Hi all, wonder if you can help me. I have a toshiba tecra 8100 which has linux suse 9.3 operating system....Well, did have until i tried to configure a dial up connection, Ever since then i have not been able to get into start menu, only have access to xconsole, xterm and icon manager. i get as far as boot options and type in username /password etc then it goes to blank page with xconsole in top left corner. I dont have any discs of recovery sort as i bought the laptop already installed with linux. I dont know too much about the technical side but i really want to fix this problem myself. Please can someone help? regards, corrinex

without more information it will be hard to fix it. What is the last thing you did?
Did you manually edit any files. What user are you logging in with?

Well i tried to configure the internal modem to make a dial up connection so i manually put in my existing internet connection that i have on my pc. I log in with user1. It does say on boot details that isdn is not detected/skipped. It has a kingston card/ethernet inserted so i tried a broadband connection disk from tiscali and this didnt work either. startx cannot be started either but i dont know if this has anything to do with it. I feel like a dime bar but i am determined to sort it and would just be happy to get the start menu back etc and deal with the other problems after that. I am no computer geek but i have to start somewhere. Your help and interest is very much appreciated.
Regards, corrine x

from what you are describing it seems that x isn't loading kde or gnome "whichever you use" its loading windowmaker

Do you have the same problem if you log in as root?
if not you could just delete the or rename the user profile then log back in as user1

You could try checking which session type you are using to log in. I'm guessing you're used to gnome or kde. If gnome or kde aren't on the list, they probably got uninstalled and will need to be reinstalled. I accidentally uninstalled a whole bunch of needed stuff when I first started using linux. Anyway, I've never used SUSE before, so I don't know anything about the package manager, but maybe someone else can help you with that if that seems to be the problem.

Ok, lets get things clear.

You mentioned you got as far as logging in, so i'll assume the system starts up fine. Next, the desktop environment. Suse (9.3 at least) uses KDE as default, so we'll assume that was what you had - if your "start menu" button was a round green lizard face then it's probably kde.
So for some reason something got corrupted/deleted/messed up/whatever and instead of loading kde it's loading some other desktop - windowmaker or perhaps twm.
Since you mentioned that you have an xterm/xconsole that means "X" is already startx, so the "startx" would have no effect other than showing some messages in the xterm/console. You could try typing "startkde" in the xterm/console and see if anything happens. Post back and tell us how it went.

Also, what type of internet connection do you have? Is it a plain old 56k dial up? Or ISDN? The Tiscali cd is most probably for windows and won't work on linux.

Hi and thankyou,

Typed in startkde as you said and it initialised the desktop screen. Some progress at last! Now how do i configure it to start kde automatically on booting?

Many thanks for your help. xxx

as root

cd /etc/X11/xinit
rm xinitrc
ln -s xinitrc.kde xinitrc


those files are for slackware, if they aren't the same try
ls -l

and look for a link file, remove it then make a new one to the correct file.