Hello,

I suddenly have a problem booting ver10.0. I have been using Mandrake for about 2 weeks now preparing to completely give up Windows. Everything has been going alright so far. Sure, slower to set up just right than Windows but I expected and even anticipated that. Small things like seting up my printer, getting sounds from my CDs and such. Having fun doing it.

But now I'm lost. I'm using the GRUB bootloader. Was skipping login screen as I'm the only user. So it would boot directly into KDE desktop. As I got a little more comfortable I changed to a passworded login checked out a couple of other desktops.(ie.Gnome,Ice,etc.)

But now when I boot,I selcet linux in GRUB, then,watching verbose mode, I see everything being checked and started, then I get BASH asking for a login. I log in and password it tells me when I last logged in. Fine but I have no idea what to do now. Now, I verbose mode, things move rather quickly, I get no more than a glance at anything but I can see the second to last item fails. I've tried and tried but can't catch what it is that fails. This seams to be putting me in BASH. I haven't had the chance yet to learn much of anything about BASH or any other console or shells or whatever. I need to know if there is a command or other method to find what the problem is.

The only things I've altered between no problem and now is changing from passwordless ligin to passworded login, and I made a couple of luanchers on my desktop for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Please, any help would be a mountain for me.

TIA
Carpetguy

You did not specify what happens after you log in so I will assume all is well except that you are sitting at a command prompt. Many systems report "Eth0 - FAILED" during boot, although it is working perfectly when done booting, try to see if that is what you have failing.

After you login with your username and password did you type " startx". That is to start your graphical user interface from command line. If that works for you then simply open a terminal window, su to root privilage, and open the file " /etc/inittab" in an editor such as Kwrite. You will see these lines in the file:

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by Mandrakelinux are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

Change the line that says "id:3:initdefault:" to say "id:5:initdefault:"

That should have you booting directly into GUI asking for login instead of command prompt.

I had a problem of this nature once when I was using 10.0... By any chance do you have an nvidia graphics card? If so, try reinstalling the drivers. 10.0 had an issue where it would rarely just seemingly decide that the nvidia drivers wouldn't work, and it would then refuse to boot into X. Of course this is just conjecture based on my experiences, but it couldn't hurt to try.

Eh, FIRST make sure that Xwindows works on your system!

From the prompt type "X" and see if you get a graphical screen with a movable mouse.

If so hit ALT-BACKSPACE to get back to the prompt then try

service start dm

which should get you to the login screen.

If the above fails you have an Xwindows driver or configuration problem that you need to rectify.

Try running XFDrake to cure the latter.

Lakota Thank you. In a way that worked. Your assumption was correct that I was sitting at a command prompt. Following your advice but I couldn't figure out how to open /etc/inittab within the terminal but did find the file to which you referred by navigating in Konquerer. I expected to be ablke to change the permissions in "properties", I guess thinking I would be prompted for a password like when I use "configure" but the file said what you said it would say.

So I rebooted, logged in as root to the desktop(not a terminal) ignored the warning about "you are root, be careful" then in Konquerer opened /etc/inittab with KWrite, made the change,saved,logged out, logged in as user, rebooted, and everthing worked fine.

I'm don't think this is exactly the method you were recommending but it worked anyway. Thank you.

Zoe F No. But thanks for trying

Objose"Command not found"

"service command not found" but it did list different options such as (I going by memory here)f|,r|,,,anyway it was for choosing full restart, another option of full restart, print list, others. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Carpetguy

P.S. I still wonder what caused this to happen in the first lace. I would try and recreate the situation but won't push my luck just yet.Lakota Lakota

Eh, just typing "X", MUST give you an Xwindow screen.

If not XFree is either not properly installed or is outright missing.

Also try "/etc/X11/X"