RE: X server problems
Braden N. McDaniel writes:
> Now when I boot the machine, my monitor goes to sleep as soon as the boot
> sequence has completed. I *think* this is because I elected to being xdm up
> at bootup when I initially installed everything, and now that setting is
> kicking in. I suspect the problem may be that the X server has not yet been
> properly configured. How can I get to a prompt so I can run xf86config?
I hit the same problem when I messed things up in a different way such
that X could not run. Once I was able to get in, I discovered that
xdm tries over and over again to bring up X, which would always fail.
I heard some talk that xdm might be changed to fall back to a console
login after a number of failures.
Anyway, I had to boot from a Debian Rescue floppy to get in. Forget
about using the "rescue" command on that floppy -- it never worked for
me. Just go ahead as if you were going to do an install. *Very*
*carefully*, use the menu commands to mount your existing swap
partition and mount your root partition, and then switch to another
virtual console (Alt-F2, is it?). From there, disable xdm somehow,
such as by renaming the xdm script in /etc/init.d. Then reboot from
your hard drive as normal.
I'm not going to use xdm again until such time as I have a backup root
partition set up (with xdm disabled) so that I can boot and repair
things without having to use the Rescue disk.
--
Fred Yankowski
fcy@mcs.net
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