[ale] Re: [ale-admin] Newbie needs help!

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Tuesday 25 February 2003 03:16 pm, John Wells wrote:
> > Uncle Flip wrote:
> >> When I boot into Linux, I get a comand line login screen which
> >> quickly disappears, then reappears, three times or so.  After that, I
> >> get an ascii dialog box that is unreadable, as the characters are
> >> garbled (loading a different character set?).  It gives two options,
> >> and I have tried both.
>
> That's gdm starting up, trying to load, and then failing after a number
> of retries.  I've seen this before.  Don't know why the characters are
> screwed but it happens on my machine so it must be a common bug.
>
> Only time I've seen this is when I had the wrong drivers loaded for my
> video card (Nvidia).
>
> It'd probably help to learn what kind of hardware you have...

And for now the thing to do is to stop trying to get into X.  If you can, 
edit the file /etc/inittab and change the defaultrunlevel to 3 instead of 
5.

If you do that, when you boot you will get the text mode login prompt.  You 
should log in and reconfigure you X server.  test that X can start with 
"startx".  Once it starts, exit it and try (as root) "telinit 5".  That 
should start your graphical login manager.  If that works, you can change 
your default runlevel back to 5.

If you can't login at all to edit /etc/inittab, you should be able to use 
grub to start in runlevel 3.  I'm embarrassed to admit I've never had to 
do that with grub, however.  Anyone want to chime in with instructions?

Michael
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