why doesn't init level 3 goto text login
 

hello all. quick question. i have icewm installed...supposedly. i want to try to exit x to try an load it up. i read that if my init level (edited /etc/inittab) is 3--which it is, it would do a text login. I was going to try to set up icewm according to the website documentation, but as with every other part of this OS, the directions made little sense. does this make sense? all-in-all i want to have icewm but am at a COMPLETE loss as to how...
any help is much appreciated...patching up holes in the wall is costly... ;)
thx

-pyrus


btw - Redhat 9

Basicaly in a linux system, you have mulitple levels of booting.
Single User mode
Text mode
Graphical mode
To name a few ... think of them as "safe mode" or normal mode under windows....
Sometimes the configuration of your windowing system (X windows) might be messed up, you will need to fix it. So you boot into level 3 (text mode) and not level 5 (graphical mode).
So once you have modified your /etc/inittab file to make you boot as level 3 by default .. you have a prompt ... at the prompt .. you will need to put in your username and password....
and that point you have to make icewm your default window manager and them type the following commange.
%>startx

By The Way startx will launch xwindows with your default window manager (gnome, kde, enlightenment, window maker .....)

And another point .. you can dynamicaly switch runtime levels (booting levels) with the following commange
%>telinit 3
or
%>telinit 5

Re: why doesn't init level 3 goto text login
 

Modifiying inittab won't take you
to a text mode login right away.

It will present you with one on reboot.

However, if you did a

su -c "init 3"
you should get a text mode only
system right away.

Cheers,
Tink

thanks a lot for the quick feedback! I'm at school so I can't test this yet. I will edit this post with success/failure...hopefully NOT the latter!
thanks again.

unfortunatly, telinit 3 isnt a recognized bash command
also, su -c "init 3" spits out: "bash: line 1: init: command not found"

if i edited the two lines in etc/inittab to runlevel 3 why does this not work? this is amazing....

Did you try running the command as root?
sudo telinit 3
or
su -c "telinit 3"
?

As for the 2 lines you edited ... what are these 2 line ?

how to you loggin ???
if you loggin via a console (NOT graphical loggin)
and type startx to load the GUI, then
you are still in run-level 3 as far as Redhat is concerned.

in this situation.

hit logout, and you weill be back to command line....

Yes i did try this as root. i will try the sudo telinit 3 command, hopefully this will accomplish the task. thanks again for the feed back, i will post back.