had created a link to the mlnet+gui command in usr/bin for quick access when i first installed the prog and it worked fine when i created it; but ever since it hasn't started from the link on my desktop, no response; so i would access it through the terminal and start it from the command prompt.

this was bugging me so i tried to fix it; in troubleshooting the problem i tried to gain su access from the terminal and then run the link from the desktop well it started accessing the hd, which i thought was good b/c it hadn't been from the link, but nothing ever came up and it just kept accessing the hd for about an hour so i just logged out and rebooted.

when it was booting up it seemed like everything was going as usual but after it finished the kernel boot and started to start x it just got stuck at the localhost login screen it would flash up and then disappear over, and over, and over, and over again.

anyway i have no idea what to do; i know very little about the boot process and would hate to screw up more

so please help

sorry for the long post

No idea what THAT might be, but in the
process you must have butchered either
you XF86Config-file or something like
that ...

Maybe your mouse isn't working
anymore ...

Read /var/log/XFree86.0.log and see
what it's complaining about

The potential reasons for X not
to start are many...

Cheers,
Tink

how can i boot to the command line?

My distro uses lilo, and on the lilo-prompt
I can add commands to the kernel...

Cheers,
Tink

After you did your su command to another user, I think that your environmental variable for DISPLAY was not set, therefore when you issued the command mlnet+gui, the mlnet server started without problem, but you never saw the X program pop up because DISPLAY was not set.

Hence people were busy downloading files from you because the server was running, and your hard disk was grinding away as a result.

So first of all, keep things simple, and just try doing

mlnet+gui &

from the command line in a X terminal emulator (xterm, rxvt, konsole or whatever you prefer) and see if that works.

After checking that, would you then like to reveal to us which desktop you are running -- Gnome, KDE, or whatever?

Talking of which, on to which partition do you download your stuff from mlnet+gui ?

If it is going to the same partition as /var or /tmp and that partition has filled up completely with all of the stuff that you were downloading while it was running, then the X server cannot write some important files it needs to write in order to start running.

/tmp/.X11-unix

In fact xfs has to create a named pipe for X before X server starts in

/tmp/.font-unix

So it could be that you are just out of space on one of your partitions. Check with

df -k

from the command line prompt when you did a boot into single user mode.

Corin you were exactly right; I checked and found that my 3 gig harddrive is full. so i deleted some downloaded files and it runs fine. thanks

thanks for the help tinkster

That'll teach you to download all those movies in one go,
without moving them off to another partition with more space :+)

it hadn't even finished the download yet!

this is just a test system i used for my first linux box; will upgrade soon, i really like linux.

its funny though, i'm so used to windows crashing that i assumed that linux did the same, when really it was my stupid error.

thanks for everyones help.