Sidney Brooks wrote:
Although one person answered the message below, I never saw it posted. In case something strange happened, I am trying it again.
Rodney D. Myers responded to it.
************************************************ I attempted to install Woody version 3.0. Everything went smoothly until I tried to use it after the installation. All I get is a blank screen and a frozen computer. I think that my problem is a video card that linux does not like, S3 Pro-Savage KM133. Any suggestions as to how I can make things work. I cannot use the text mode, therefore I cannpt change any files.
Does Ctrl-Alt-F2 not switch you to a workable text-based console? From there you should be able to repair whatever's wrong.
Otherwise you can, at the "boot:" prompt (assuming you're using lilo and not grub, etc), enter "linux single" to boot into single-user mode, where you can then repair what's wrong.
Once at a text-based console, the first thing to do is to disable the automatic startup of X. You're probably using a graphical session manager, either xdm, wdm, kdm, or gdm. There are several ways to do this; probably the way I would do it is to temporarily put the single line "exit 0" as the first executable line in the session manager start-up script. This script will be in "/etc/init.d", and will have a symlink in "/etc/rc2.d". The script in "/etc/init.d" will probably be named "xdm", "wdm". "kdm". or "gdm". The script in "/etc/rc2.d" will have a "S" and a number in front of the script name, like "S99kdm" or "S98gdm". You can disable the graphical session for the current boot only by running this script with the "stop" flag, like so: "/etc/init.d/kdm stop" (which you'll want to do _before_ adding "exit 0" to the script).
Now run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and play with the X settings, and then try starting X with "startx". Once you get a working system, you can remove the "exit 0" and then run the script with the "start" option and see if the graphical session manager (GUI logon screen) works.
Success! -- Kent