Hello,

Could anyone tell me how to get back from the text mode to the graphic mode? I can't remember how it happened exactly, but when I installed a media player, the system somehow switched to the text mode. I've searched this forum and found out (in a 6-year-old post) that commands 'startx' or 'init5' could help. Unfortunately, they did not.

As I have little experience with Linux, I'd like to make sure that the following steps were correct:
Step 1: I logged as 'root'
Step 2: I typed the command 'startx' / 'init5'

Hopefully, someone could help.

Thanks,

L

changing the 3 to 5 in /etc/initab
will NOT fix that
that file was not changed
it probably still has the gui started but then crashes


what media player ?
from where ?
and HOW was in installed ?
did you use yast and from the suse SDB ???

in all likely hood you killed the gui ( KED3 i am guessing by the old suse11 sp1 , seeing as it is past it's End of life.

novel stopped support for 11sp1 two months ago

you might want to install the current 11.3


the boot and xorg logs would help .
The error will be in the logs
/var/log/xorg.0.log
/var/log/boot.log
/var/log/messages

from the test only boot use "nano "
nano is a text editor for the terminal

Many thanks for the prompt reply. The media player was from an official repository, either Oss or Non-oss. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the player. For the installation I most likely used Yast.
Before installing a new version / different distribution I'd like to get to the graphic mode of the current version. You wrote
the boot and xorg logs would help and that the error will be in the logs
/var/log/xorg.0.log
/var/log/boot.log
/var/log/messages

Then you write from the test only boot use "nano "
nano is a text editor for the terminal
Code:

su -
nano /var/log/xorg.0.log

Unfortunately, the above is not explicit enough for me. Where shall I type 'nano'? Or rather, what should the exact steps be? Logging as 'root' and then what?

Thanks,

L

you do not have a GUI to use to login to
all you have is the text only boot and login .
the gui is crashing during boot .

so

there are two NON gui editors and nano is a default installed one
VI is the other
MC is a third - but not installed by default

the easiest to use is "nano"

login as root - no gui so it is fine
or login as a normal user and use the "su -" to become root

once you are ROOT type in
and that will display the " xorg.0.log "

for a list of files in the log folder do tis
seeing as you say you used the gui yast to install the media player there WILL be a log of this in " zypper.log"

nano /var/log/zypper.log

that might help with figuring what happened

-- but--
i think you might have installed something incompatible with the older 11 sp1 and kde3

Since you mentioned this a few different times, I think it's worth pointing out that openSuSE is always a couple of service packs ahead of the enterprise versions, but the thread title says he's running SLED, which is currently at version 11 SP1.

Enterprise versions have to be much more stable, whereas people can be more experimental when it's free (SLED and SLES are still free to download, but you have to pay for a subscription to receive updates), and basically what happens is openSuSE users are beta-testing for the enterprise users.

Also, KDE4 is available in SLED/SLES 11.1. It's been there since at least version 10.

Thanks both of you for trying to help. In the end I opted for the easiest solution for me: installing Ubuntu with which I've had some experience.