Black Screen of Death: Startup Trouble
 

I was trying to configure my laptop to use the synaptics touchpad drivers. After editing xorg.conf, I restarted and X11 failed to start. After automatically retrying to start X11 a few times, a text message box popped up saying that it failed and asked if I wanted to see the logs and run the X11 mouse setup program. I did and it worked and I got back in X11. I tried to the configure the synaptic drivers again. It also failed and the process repeated. Then, somehow, I got to the point where after the text-only part of the startup, the screen turns solid black and I can't seem to do anything. However, the drive light keeps going for a while like the system is starting, unaware that something didn't work right. I tried pressing ctrl-alt-F1 through F6 to try to get to a console but it didn't work. I tried logging in blind (waiting a while then typing user name and password.) I tried pressing "I" for the interactive text-based startup but it switched to the black screen away. I used a recovery disc to edit the xorg.cong file. I even tried deleting (well, renaming anyway) the config file all togeher. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any idea what is going on and how to fix it? I search the forums and found a few people who had similar problems but there were no responses. Is there anyway to keep FC3 in a text-only mode? Please help!

-Brandon

Not too sure if I can help with your problem but I thought I would mention I have had nothing but problems with the synaptics touchpad drivers myself. I finally got them working on my notebook after installing Ubuntu, the only distro I tried that had them dialed out of the box. Unfortunately I don't really like Ubuntu, it's way too crufty and unaccessable, but that's another story.

Anyway, check out /etc/inittab and change the "initdefault" line from 5 to 3. Then you get a text login. Probably best till you get your X problem sorted out. Run startx to try a new X configuration. ctrl-alt-backspace should kill it, but I experienced some hard 'X' lockups when X didn't like the touchpad configuration. Do you have tsdev and endev modules or built in the kernel? I believe synaptics requires them.

Good luck!

Unless FC3 comes with tsdev and endev built-in or as modules, I don't. I thought about that after I started having the trouble but I took the synaptic module line out of the xorg.conf. Unless the synaptic driver is getting loaded some other way, that shouldn't be a problem... or so I would assume. I'll give run level 3 a try and see what happens.

And by the way, incase you are still interested, Mandrake supports Alps touchpads "out of the box." However, I was less than impressed by Mandrake's performance on my laptop and memory usage (nearly 170 MB with nothing open, right after startup!!!) so I changed to FC3 almost immediately and have been fairly impressed.

I got it working again so I thought I would post some info since none of the other related threads I saw had answers in them. Boot from the System Rescue disc. Created a directory to mount your partition with the /etc directory to and then go ahead mounted it to that newly created directory. I then used the run_qtinyeditor command to launch a nice little text editor (so much better than fooling around with Vi.) Then as suggested, I edited /etc/inittab so that the default run level was 3 instead of 5. I then rebooted from the harddrive. Without X11 launching and messing things up, I was actually able to startup all the way and log in. I then used system-config-mouse to reconfigure my mouse since that was what started all this trouble in the first place. I then ran system-config-display to reconfigure the monitor. Using system-config-display will startup a graphic interface so at first it will switch to the dreaded black screen. This really freaked me out at first but then the X cursor appeared and a few seconds later, the rest of the setup appeared. Make whatever changes you need to make and exit. When I exited the program, a lot of multi-colored garbage appeared on my monitor. However, the system wasn't locked up so I pressed the power button to shutdown the computer. When I restarted it, I used startx to launch X11 and everything was fine. I then edited inittab so that the default runlevel was 5 again. If anyone has the same problem I had, I hope this helps. If not, feel free to ask questions.