here are my questions


1. In Gnome (rh9) i goto lock the screen but nothing happens, whats up with this.

2. How can I change my login to be just command line, and then start an x window manager if i choose?

thanks in advance

I would guess you are using root, which you should not do in X. xscreensaver does not have permission to control root xsessions.

edit /etc/inittab and set the id to 3

id:3:initdefault:

this is the runlevel, 5 is for x

so runlevel determines the login session? Ive heard that before but never knew what runlevel was.

whats 4 then

actually runlevel determines a lot of things, one being starting X, but there are a lot more services that may be running in certain runlevels.

look at the folders in /etc/rc.d. In these folders you will see the links that start and stop services at the different runlevels, each runlevel has a folder. shutdown of your computer consists of bringing it down to runlevel 0, runlevel 6 is also a shutdown but instead of poweroff it is setup to reboot the system.


runlevel 4 is not normally used for anything special, however I think slackware used to run X in runlevel 4.

checkout these commands with man


chkconfig ( used setup links in the runlevel folders, determines what gets started and stopped)

service ( used to start a servie from the command line)

init ( or telinit, can be used to change runlevels from the command line)