I'm running Red Hat 8.0. It's been running it stably for about half a year (prior to which I had some limited experience with Mandrake 8.1). About a week ago I downloaded the 2.4.21 kernel source, applied the low-latency and preemptible kernel patches, and compiled. The new kernel showed up in GRUB, but refused to boot (it complained about not being about to open device "LABEL=/".) I assumed that I'd missed something important when I was configuring the build options, so I restarted and chose the old kernel from GRUB's menu. Everything seemed to load normally, but at the point when I'm usually presented with a graphical login, my monitor simply starts switching itself in and out of power saving mode. Sometimes my monitor would be on long enough to show a text based login screen momentarily before shutting off again a fraction of a second later. I've tried to login blind, but I've not been successful. I can still switch consoles, but they all make the monitor do the same thing. When I get tired of this, I can hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the monitor stops, and the system restarts politely - displaying all the normal shutdown messages along the way.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Benjamin Flaming
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"The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots."

Do you have a specific driver for your graphics card? say Nvidia?

Then you'll need to re-compile the module for that to make X work.

If the readme confuses you, (It did me for a while) I talk you through it.

Your using grub I see so goto edit the lines and add a number to the end of the kernel line, for the runlevel on your distro that boots into console. (For the desprate try 1)

Why don't you log in into text mode to then find out what is wrong with X.

I'll walk you through the steps. First, when the GRUB appears, choose edit, (either Ctrl+e or some other key, I don't remember as I use lilo), and the add 'init 3' to the en of the second line. Be sure to leave a space between this and the other option.

Now select boot in the GRUB options, and you will boot into the text mode. You can check for your X drivers, and recompile them from here on.

If you need any other help, post your queries.

leonscape - about a minute after reading your message, I had a command prompt available to me. Thanks a million! I won't try to tackle any serious diagnostic work until tomorrow, but now that I have a command prompt again, maybe I should focus on getting the new kernel compiled and running properly, since I'd probably break X again in the process anyway.

UltimaGuy - I got runlevel 3 working by simply adding " 3" to the kernel line. Would you recommend using " init 3" instead?

Thank you both very much for having taken the time to help me!

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Benjamin Flaming
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"The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots."