Re: Debian Linux Problem
On Thu, 26 Mar 1998 Neil@lander.es wrote:
> Hi Debian Users !
Hi Neil,
First: I hope you're subscribed to debian-user, because I'm not going to
edit your antispam stealth email address. I hate spam, but I don't think
that it would be a good solution to the problem if everybody uses an
obfuscated email address which you had to edit every time you reply to
someone. I you're receiving that much spam, figure out a receipe with
procmail, or convince your ISP to use RBL on their mailservers.
> VGA and the board was something I can't remember. Anyway, the final
> question was if I wanted to start the x-server now, and answered Yes.
> The problem begins now: The system boots up properly, but when it
> gets to :
>
> Debian GNU/Linux 1.3 onyx tty1
>
> onyx login: _
>
> The system goes crazy and the screen goes off, then turns on as
> ScreenSaver mode, then flashes the login screen, and then restarts the
> cicle. The times this happens is :
>
> login screen : 0,5 seconds
> off screen : 1,0 seconds
> saver screen : 1,0 seconds
What you probably did is to make your computer run xdm. Xdm then runs the
xserver and you have to login to xdm before it gives you a session on the
server. In your case, it seems that the xserver is dying prematurely and
then restarted again and again by xdm.
This situation locks you pretty much out of the virtual consoles to fix
the problem, because every time xdm starts a new xserver, you're thrown
into the virtual console where the xserver runs on.
You might try to stop xdm from respawning xservers by hitting Ctrl-R until
it stops your screen from flashing or until your finger hurts too much.
When you succeed at that, you can kill off xdm completely by typing
"/etc/init.d/xdm stop", but you'll probably have to login as root first.
If that still doesn't work, you'll have to boot in single mode - rescue
mode is a lot more drastic, I don't think that's necessary. You can do
that by typing "linux single" at the lilo prompt.
If you don't know what lilo is, just take out the installation
bootdiskette (also called "rescue disk" for exactly this kind of purpose)
and at the first prompt type "linux single."
Next, the system will come up only in single-user mode and there will be
no xdm running. You can log in as root on the console and then edit the
file /etc/X11/config. change the line "start-xdm" in "no-start-xdm" and
logout. The system will change to a default runlevel (multi-user) and this
time, xdm is not run.
Now it's time to fix your real problem: the xserver doesn't run properly
and you have to diagnose and fix it. Begin by starting the xserver
manually until it runs reliably without errors (hint: there are a lot of
man pages you can read and also some fine README's in /usr/doc/X11. You
can always try XF86Setup, which is a nice GUI tool.)
Only when you have an xserver working make it be run by xdm again (I think
you can guess what it takes to make it be run again.) If you're all set,
you don't need to reboot to make xdm start (this isn't windoze,) just type
"/etc/init.d/xdm start". BTW /etc/init.d/xdm is just a script, you can
have a look at it with more (or less ;-) ) to see what it does.
Cheers,
Joost
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