Hi,

Well im a ....

I have installed FC3 it worked verywell until I donwloaded and installed (java) jre and jdk, after that suddenly i was unable to start any program so I restarted.

Fc appears to boots fine, but when it should showme the login screen, it only shows a black screen and the mouse cursor (with the sand clock).....

I have the FC rescue cd, so i can boot with it and have shell, but don't know what to search? or what can be the problem....

Can somebody tellme what can be wrong? or what can I do?

Sorry for my bad english...
Thanks for your time.

What desktop environment or Windows manager were you using before? One thing to do is switch to a virtual terminal by typinmg CTRL+ALT+F1 and then log in through that and see if any of your system logs report error messages. You might also look for a file called .xsession-errors in your home directory and see if it contains any information.

Sorry, I was using KDE but also have gnome.

I will look at .xsession-errors and tell you what I get.

Thank you.

that's funny java's jdk doesn't even install in any of the system folders (it installs in /opt/jdk-1.5 & /opt/netbeans)

something else has happend to the system.

but nothing is crashing, something is waiting to start.

while you are wating for X to startup you need to check out what's really up.

first change to a console using the forementioned method of CTRL+ALT+F1 (or F2 or F3 and so on)

login as root
next change to text mode using the init command (init is the program which handles starting up system software)

init 3

now you need to edit your .xinitrc file (<- note the period before the x )

jmacs ~/.xinitrc (or emacs or vi or pico or nano or joe or zile or whatever you use as an editor)

add the following 2 lines

exec xterm &
exec twm

twm is the most basic type of window manager


if there is stuff in here then comment it all out (prepend the # to every line)
and then add the above lines

then save and exit the editor (for emacs like editors the command is CTRL+x, CTRL+c (dont let go of CTRL), for vi its ESCAPE for command mode, then :w to write and :q to quit

woops wrong button.

anyhow next you need to try X again.

by typing

startx

if it just sits there again w/ the hour glass then press CRTL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill the X server
and you then will know something is wrong w/ X or your hardware.

if it works (you will only see and xterm (or 2), and possibly a clock)

you will then know that something is wrong w/ gdm or kde

go back and edit your .xinitrc file again and replace the ' exec twm ' line w/ ' exec startkde '

and try again.

if kde starts just fine then you know something is up w/ gdm and can go from there.