To Return or Not?

eric.proctor · #1 16th January 2005, 07:47 PM

Dual booting xp pro and fedora core 3 currently and am having issues with all flavors attempted thus far. Even knoppix had issue that when doing the logout process, it just all appears jumbled to the point of being static. the implication of this is that I can't ctrl alt f1 to get outof the xwindows to change runlevel. hence i can't install nvidia driver. this is the only issue thus far, but easily will come up again. my question is should Ijump ship and return it? Could it be a bios issue? can you flash the bios from cd? I don't want to return the notebook, but I'm sure that this will cause more issues later on. Does anyone have any ideas why it would be doing this?

HP zx5410
athlon 64 3000

imdeemvp · #2 16th January 2005, 10:40 PM

Ctrl+alt+f1 will only kill the x enviroment but what you really need to do is to get to the true console or text mode. Become root and type:

Code:

/sbin/telinit 3

that will take you to text mode and to log in again type:

Code:

/sbin/telinit 5

to re-start X.

Jman · #3 17th January 2005, 07:13 AM

Rescue mode to the rescue.

v8s10blazer · #4 17th January 2005, 12:28 PM

Yah do what jman said and use the first boot cd to use rescue mode. It will load a command line interface and you should be able to install nvidia driver.. If not, theres somewhere you can change your default boot into run level 3... i forgot what config file it is, i dont have to do it that much. I can look it up, but im sure someone around here knows it off the top of their head...

Petrohead · #5 17th January 2005, 12:52 PM

Here's the first few lines of /etc/inittab

Code:

#
# inittab       This file describes how the INIT process should set up
#               the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author:       Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
#               Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS 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:3:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

See the line that reads id:3:initdefault: ?

Your's probably reads id:5:initdefault:

Change it to 3 and you will boot up in 'console' mode or run level 3. You type startx to get to a gui from this mode. When you log out from a gui session you will drop back to run level 3.

eric.proctor · #6 18th January 2005, 01:17 PM

Thanks a bunch all. I'll give that a try later today. Hopefully, this will resolve any issues that I was having, but I'm hoping to resolve the issue as well. I'm thinking it's something with the settings of the frame buffer mode, and was looking for assistance as how to get this adjusted. When I ran slackware on it, this was not an issue, so it's not linux in and of itself, any assistance would be great. Thanks all.