Hi, I just installed RedHat AS2. I installed all the packages.

On boot up, I get the following choices from Grub:

1)Red Hat Linux Advanced Server (2.4.9-e.3smp)
2)Red Hat Linux Advanced Server-up (2.4.9-e.3)
3)DOS

I go for

1)It gives one screen of boot messages and then does absolutely nothing no matter how long you wait.

I cant Ctrl-Alt-Del and so I reboot and go back to grub.

2)I choose this and end up with a linux prompt. I do not get the same graphical interface as I used to get in RH9 inspite of installing KDE and Gnome.

I get this message during the boot up messages:

Initialising usb ohci: FAILED

Then I get the login prompt and enter my user name and password.

I type startx and get this message:

execve failed for /etc/X11/X (err no 2)
giving up.
xinit: No such file or directory (errorno 20: unable to connect to X server.
xinit :No such process (errno 3):Server error.

What is this server it requires? I'm just a desktop user who only connects to the internet and no particular server in general.

3)I get these messages:

Booting 'DOS'
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

I've waited for a long time but nothing happens.

As you can now see, I have access only to the prompt from the second option. If anyone has any idea of how to make my Windows or Linux work, kindly offer me some help. Thanks for your time.

Hi

First of all, the version of Red Hat you have installed is not intended for the desktop user. It is meant for net server machines and normally would not even have X installed. Get a copy of Fedora Core 5 and install it instead. It will provide what you are looking for. I suspect you are seeing the errors because the application doesn't have an X server installed on it 9 (the server you asked about. It is an internal graphical sreen server, not a server in tradition network sense.)
You can download FC5 from this forum or from the Fedora web site.

Hope this helps

BTW, Fedora is not the only distro you can use for a home desktop. For someone completely new to Linux, I recommend Mepis. It's Debian based, extremely easy to use, and has excellent hardware recognition. It also comes stock with some commercial things like Flashplayer (you would normally have to add this after installation in most distrobutions.

Bob

Thanks a lot for your opinion Bob. I'll try and download Fedora later. But as you can see right now, I cannot use my computer for anything except for the commands I can type for the bash prompt. I have absolutely no idea, how to repair my computer without reinstalling the OS. I did install the GNOME and KDE environments. I remember checking those two options. I don't know if startx is the right command. If it is not possible to repair the installation, kindly tell me so and I will install some other OS. Thank yo for trying and helping me out.

Hi

startx is the right command to start your desktop from a command line prompt. If you have in fact install gnome or kde, then it appears that the installation of X was not complete.

This error means that no such file was discovered. It appears that X did not completely install.

The file /etc/X11/X which shoud be a symbolic link to the X server, does not exist. It implies that your X installation is not complete, the configuration program has not made the correct link. Most of the time this is the last thing the configuration program does. You try to complete this symbolic link manually, but I am not sure which X server that distro uses.

This, of course, is where your system is trying to boot into Windows. During installation, do you remember where you installed the GRUB bootloader? With one drive partitioned into one partition for each operating system, you should install GRUB to the MBR (Master Boot Record). It appears that GRUB is not installed in MBR.

Since you have not started using the Linux system yet, it may me easier to just reinstall as you did in the beginning, but paying particular attention to installing GRUB to the MBR.

I wish I could offer something quick and easy, but it looks like there is a lot of missing files in your installation.

Bob

I remember installing Grub into the MBR. While installing AS2, I chose the option that asked me to install all the packages. I don't know what went wrong.

Anyway, I reinstalled RH9 yesterday. Thanks a lot for your help though.