Guest greeneggs Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 Hi This evening I got a little bit greedy and began downloading a whole bunch of games from the FTP section here. This went on for about two hours and I was having such a good time until I began to notice that my hard drive was cooking like crazy. Finally, I decided to reboot but the hard drive was cooking so hard that it took forever and so finally I just hit CTRL/ALT/DEL and shut the computer down. When I rebooted, I got a login shell but it did not automatically take me to the KDE desktop. I rebooted several more times and still I got the shell so I just typed my username and password into the shell and I still had a boring black screen staring back at me and had no idea how to get KDE to come up (and still don't!). Next, I remembered someone here telling me that I could rebuild MDK by inserting the first CD and choosing "upgrade". I tried this and when I rebooted, the screen started flashing as if it was trying to boot into the KDE desktop but eventually it went crazy and I got a black screen again (but no login this time). So, I tried doing a rescue. This did'nt help either. I also read that certain third party software can cause problems like the one I was having. I decided that it was time to do a complete reinstall and so I did and everything works fine again but what SHOULD I have done under these circumstances so that when the black login shell appeared I could have gotten it to go into KDE?. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 you got a login shell type your username and password and you get logged it to a fully functional "boring black screen" UI. Then type startx to startup the default wm which would be KDE. It is extremely rare that you would have to do an reinstall during normal operation. If the startx command gave a lot of errors you could login as root by typing su then the root password, then type XFdrake to run the mandrake graphic server setup tool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 You might have been able to login with your user name and password, and then simply type "startx" without the quotes, of course. But I suspect that your x server, the program that is creating the windowing environment, was having a bad day. Learning some command line stuff is a really good idea, so that you can fix problems outside of the windows environment. Try working with the console while in kde, and get the feel for it, knowing that your gui is right there in front of you. :wink: You can launch programs, install software, look at the file system, all from the console. So, if it happens again, you will feel comfortable without the gui. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest greeneggs Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 Hey thank's people. So would I have to type in "startx" each time from that point on or would there be a way to make it just automatically boot to KDE each time once I got past the shell? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 A lot of folks boot to the command line, and then launch x from there. It's personal preference. I launch to an x login manager. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted April 11, 2003 Report Share Posted April 11, 2003 Hey thank's people. So would I have to type in "startx" each time from that point on or would there be a way to make it just automatically boot to KDE each time once I got past the shell? although i would recommend that you always boot to the console mode and install Xtart (to switch between available windowmanagers), it might not be convenient for you so just check SoulSe's post and do it in reverse. ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobGuy© Posted April 12, 2003 Report Share Posted April 12, 2003 Hey thank's people. So would I have to type in "startx" each time from that point on or would there be a way to make it just automatically boot to KDE each time once I got past the shell? You can also try KDE at the prompt. Cause its aliased. $ alias alias kde='xinit /usr/bin/startkde' There are quite a few alias in ~/.bashrc, more than I posted here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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