On Tue, 16 May 2000, you wrote:
> Well, I had my first big Linux problem today. I had been in this morning
> looking at some rpm packs and shutdown as usual. After lunch when I booted,
> lilo went through its checklist with all [OK] and gets to the black screen
> that you see just before the KDE login screen appears. Then there is a quick
> flash of color in the center as KDE is trying to start then black screen,
> flash of color black screen, flash of color black screen, and so on. I had
> no avenue of escape other than the reset switch.
Tha fact that you got this far means that you did not kill Linux, but somehow
messed up something for X.
> If anyone has an idea as to what might have caused my problem or better
> yet a way to fix it if it happens again let me know. 2 things you can cross
> off the list are hardware changes and display properties they were all the
> same.
Depends on exactly what you were doing while looking at rpms. Did you install
or delete any?
If it happens again do the following:
boot to the Linux console (enter linux 3 at the lilo prompt)
try to start x with the following command string
startx > xinfo_stdout 2> xinfo_stderr
x will probably die on you the same way that it did before, to make things
easier now, just swap consoles (ctrl-alt-f2) and login again.
Take a look at the xinfo_stdout and xinfo_stderr files in youre home directory.
Something in them might give us a clue as to what happened.
--
Alex
(Go easy on me, I'm a COBOL programmer in real life)
