Hi all,

Thank you in advance for reading this. I an running Mandrake 10.1, and it was going very well until I started messing with settings. I am using a IBM ThinkPad A30, I decided to mess with the mouse settings. That is when things went wrong, i clicked on the wrong mouse. Once I clicked on the new mouse setting the new mouse setup box opened and i had no control of it. so I did a hard restart, which is where my problems begin. I know very little about command line operations other than reboot and startx. When the computer restarts it gives me the standard how do you want to start dialog box, I have tried regular boot and failsafe. No matter what I choose to start it seems to cycle through startx about three times(it just flashes real quick) then it gives me a command line login. When I login and type startx it tries then shuts down. I am at work so I can not give the error it states. My other problem is that the 3 install disks that i HAD my dog decided to see what cd's taste like, so I have no install disks.

Like I said before thank you for taking the time to read this.

justin

I´ve had similar problems, but those were regarding free space(I didnt have any).
In the verbose mode, during startup, do you get any errors?
Also you can try logging in as root and see if that helps.(after logging in try ¨mdkkdm¨ or ¨startx¨, if x is not already running) You may also want to try another display manager like gdm. After logging in through command line, try
If you dont have gdm installed, you can download it through urpmi(if you have set that up).

On a lighter note, your dog ate the cds?? . I´d love to see your dog do that again.
Did it swallow it fully or just bite and break it??Mine likes to play frisbie with old CDs.

No he didn't eat them fully just lots of slobber and teeth marks, I got lucky because my pcmcia usb card was sitting right next to the disks. I'll try that when i get home, startx doesn't work in regular user or root. The only error I get is when the pcmcia network card is installed.

thaks
justin

I think my main problem is that when I changed the mouse from generic ps/2 to the touchpad it freaked out on me. Is there a way to change this setting back from the command line.

try mcc of xorgcfg from command line for configuring the touchpad.
edit: I think xorgcfg will be the better option.

cool I'll try that when I get home

When I type in xorgcfg will it be pretty self explanitory or as a N00b will I be lost.

Sorry to be such a pain.

justin

when you type xorgcfg, you get a simple gui with a lot of icons(they look windows 98 ish!). Click on the mouse icon, then the rest must be easy. (I have not tried it myself, but it must work.)
Hope this works.
Bye.

I've had this problem for a different reason in the past - If Xorg is set up to use a mouse, it can't start without one being present.

It would appear that by changing the mouse setting, you changed the place Xorg looks for the mouse. So now it can't start. (This happened to me when I didn't link /dev/mouse to /dev/psaux in my udev settings)

Just getting the right mouse into /etc/X11/xorg.conf should fix the problem.

I think that is my whole question, will xorgcfg fix /etc/X11/xorg.conf or will I have to manually edit it? If so how is that accomplished(i.e. commands and such).

thanks
justin

It should fix it, yes.

Otherwise, you could use a text editor such as pico or nano (or vi or emacs if you're brave) to change the Mouse settings: Dead easy to do, type "nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf" when logged in as root.

You should just have to go down to the settings for the mouse and change them from "/dev/whatever" to "/dev/psaux". That should be all that's needed to fix the problem

It's a basic gui, but you can control the mouse with your numpad (you'll see)

you guys freakin rock that worked great, now I can use KDE again.

thanks for all the help,

justin

We are happy for you.