[Nottingham] Odd Mandrake problems

[Michael Erskine]

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 14:15, Richard Davies wrote:
> She doesn't know of a local LUG I have just Googled for one and the closest
> I can find is TASLUG in Hobart which would from memory put her about 150
> miles away. She doesn't have a car so 300 mile round trip on the bus with
> computer is probably not going to work.

Clearly impractical -- any friendly neighbour with net access within 
reasonable distance?

> > She should be able to identify and possibly fix any problem with Knoppix
> > of similar bootable CD distro and some instruction, possibly by phone.
>
> That is what I am thinking I am just wondering where would be the best
> place to start looking for this error, before I start running up phone
> calls.

From the original post (which was erroneously created from a reply to a 
previous thread - tut, tut! :)) we can see that there's an issue with the 
Display manager (XDM, GDM, KDM or similar) and there's a lot that can be 
tried from this position: 

kill X with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE -- the display manager may automatically 
restart X and it might even come up OK!

Login to a virtual terminal -- switch with CTRL-ALT-F1 for vt1, CTRL-ALT-F2 
for vt2, etc. 

Take a look at the XFree86 logs (usually in /var/log)

Kill the display manager (as root) with the appropriate init script 
in /etc/init.d/.

With the display manager suitably culled we can start X on its own with the 
startx command whilst logged into a virtual terminal. Then we can see if 
XFree86 is fine. At this point your friend may be up and running.

Regards,
Michael Erskine.

-- 
It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.  :-)
		-- Larry Wall in <199801141725.JAA07555 at wall.org>



		
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