Mandrake X Startup

[Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com]

>My brother-in-law has recently installed Mandrake 8.0.  It has been
>working fine for a couple weeks now.
>
>I've never run Mandrake, but I've seen what it's supposed to look like
>when it starts up.  He normally gets a graphical login screen (rather
>than the text-mode console login that I'm used to).
>
>Recently, for some unknown reason, (after that very ugly, blocky
>low-resolution penguin graphic) he's getting a 'localhost login:' prompt
>followed by what sounds like a few of the last kernel hardware detection
>messages followed by a blinking cursor.  He's able to hit 'Enter' and
>login using this apparent text-based console.  From there, I told him to
>'startx' (he's very new to Linux) and this seems to get X11 running OK.
>
>Any ideas what has happened that suddenly "broke" the graphical login
>that he's used to?  In Mandrake, how is this triggered so that he can
>restore this?


Mandrake decides whether or not to start X based on the runlevel that init
sets, so the first thing he should do is try run `runlevel` and see if it's
at 5 or not.  If not, then edit the /etc/inittab file and make sure that
the following line is there:

id:5:initdefault:

If it's there, but the number is something else (ie. 3), change it to 5 and
reboot.  If init is setting the runlevel OK, then the problem may be with
the display manager.  Mandrake starts X by running `/etc/X11/prefdm
-nodaemon`, so also have him try that from the command line to see if
perhaps there's a problem with KDM or GDM.

Hope that helps!

PaulM