System no longer boots to graphical login
 

Hi, I have recently installed knoppix (most recent release). It has been running on my machine for about a week without any problems until yesterday. I booted the machine and instead of kdm - the graphical login screen, I was left at the console login. The system is set to run at runlevel 5. The last message on the screen left by the boot process was:

Starting K display manager: kdm already running

I can login at the console but noticed that bash didn't read my .bashrc file. I can get X (and KDE) up and running with "startx" but I have noticed some differences in KDE. All of my settings seem to be in place (such as kde look and feel and config files such as .bashrc seem to be active now) but all of the font sizes in KDE are larger - both on the desktop, in Konquorer and in applications such as Firefox). I have no idea what has happened.

Has anybody ever encountered anything similar? If yes did you manage to solve the problems?

Thanks in advance.

will103

/etc/init.d/kdm stop
/etc/init.d/kdm start

I've noticed that strange things start to happen if network connection is down. Before getting a new router/adsl modem gdm wouldn't let me login to Gnome session. Windowmaker worked flawlessly. Similar thing happened on Knoppix installed on another machine: if network cable was unplugged, kdm would not start.

The problem was (if I recall correctly) that the "Fully Qualified Domain Name" could not be resolved. What it means, is that it tries to get hostname information from the network, but it just can't, so it halts.

I fixed the thing by following command:

dpkg-reconfigure etherconf # if necessary, apt-get etherconf

Hostname = localhost
Domain = # leave empty
eth0 = not removable, configure with dhcp, no dhcp-hostname

Previously I had used my machine's network name and my university's domain as hostname and domain.

Hi, thanks for the suggestions. I decided to reinstall the system in the end.

Cheers

will103