Hi Folks,

I'm a complete linux newbie....

i had my machine running for a month or two until i rebooted it.

Upon reboot..it just doesnt start


Its weird to me, but i'll try to explain.


On boot the system comes up, goes through all its checks...then it gets to a command prompt type screen asking for username/password...but this page flashes off every 3-4 seconds...and whatever i had typed (i.e. username) disappears..so I have to really quickly type it...but even after it just keep sflashing on and off...

I have no idea where to start with this...

I looked through the forum and someone said Try typing "xstart" ..I did that..and it stopped the flashing..and it dumped a big error message on me

its really long - not sure if I can even copy it here to my other pc word by word

but it says

Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!

Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'



Let me know what else to run and show you guys...

Thanks folks..

oh by the way..not that I logged in...

when I do a simple ls

the "inst" folder is red and flashing...

what on earth does that mean!?!?

Do you know if you are booting into a GUI like KDE or Gnome? Is it the login box that is flashing or the whole screen at a command prompt with the white on black background? If your are booting up into a GUI Try this: Boot up, hit Ctrl-alt-backspace then login as a user then try startx . If you get that error after that try typing xwmconfig and choose another GUI to use until you can fix the other one. I have got that same error starting KDE after a bad upgrade. By the way what distro are you using? Supply more info for more help.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue93/yuan.html

that link has an article about your problem. I had the same problem and it ended up the problem was i was out of disk space and some program was trying to write to a tmp folder. From the commandline i deleted some stuff rebooted and it worked for me. good luck.