Hi,

I'm a newb....and I've been a fiddlin'....now when I boot into Mandrake 9.2 or Mandriva as it's now called, I am met with a black screen with some writing then it says:

Localhost Login:

I type my username and password and I'm in....the problem being that I don't know my way around this sorta thing. I want the GUI back {is that correct?}, y'know the colourful welcome screen asking who wants to log in and when you do you go to the desktop, etc.

I know I must have enabled this new logon option, but I wonder can I type in some command that will reboot into the good ole login screen and keep it that way?

Thanks in advance.

after login, type, startx, and press enter.

The GUI should start. If not you may have damaged xorg.conf. see how you go.

Thanks Glenn, I understand that....startx is telling it to start the GUI?? Its so simple I shoulda thought of that...I'll report back on this.

Thanks GlennsPref,

It worked! Thanks so very muchly....

Then........I went back into the control centre thingy and clicked on Boot in the left pane, then ticked and deselected everything back how it was....

Well, now there's a new hurdle....

When I log out the black terminal style window re-appears and starts writing text and at the bottom it say's:

Waiting for X server to shut down.

Then theres {my username}@localhost {my username} 1$ and it seems like it wants me to type something????

I can't reboot unless I press the reboot button on my tower.

Any ideas on what to try now??

The command "halt" without the quotation marks will make it physically shut down at that point.

now you've found that switch, U should now look for the tick box that takes care of shutting down too.

You can type from the Konsole, "shutdown -h now" with out quotes, to Halt

or "shutdown -r now" with out quotes, to reboot

These are not hacks, the system will shutdown properly "unmounting drives and services"

But sometime a shutdown dialog is neater.

Have a look in MCC the boot section and configure it here . Shutdown will then be automatic

Hi,

Well the probs I mentioned in my previous post seem to have miraculously sorted themselves out.

Now when I start my PC and select Linux or Mandrake or whatevers there, it goes through the motions of showing a lot of text against a black background and arrives at the Welcome screen where I can log in!

I'm happy!

I've since learnt that if I select Log Out from the menu a box appears with the options to reboot or shutdown, so that's straightforward. enough.

Sometimes even linux needs a reboot before the settings start taking effect.

There is a way of starting and stopping services from cli, but they are particular for the service your wanting to act on.

In MCC there's a section called "system", it's a list of services and daemons that are setable to start at boot time.

Another place to turn off things you don't need.

"DM" for display manager.