[SWLUG] turned off GUI ? somehow

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 07:59:55PM +0000 or thereabouts, STEPHEN CONSTANTINOU wrote:
> I have been off the list for some time as I could not afford to 
> get my laptop repaired.  This is now done and I am returning to 
> Linux (Mandrake 9.1).
> 
> Somehow I have managed to stop the gui login box occuring that 
> led me into KDE. I now only boot to the command line.  So I login 
> as a user but do not know what to type to start KDE. I have tried 
> KDE and ./kde and x and X 

Try "startx" ; it's usually a good bet for this. 

> I have also looked at the KDE website but no pre GUI info available.  
> It assumes you get to a gui login where you then select a user and login.
> I have looked in the Mandrake manual as well.

Instructions for what to do when the box boots up usually live in 
/etc/inittab. It often includes a line which dictates whether the
box stays at the command line login or whether it starts X and 
throws up the graphical login prompt too. 

On Fedora, it says

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
#   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#   1 - Single user mode
#   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
#   3 - Full multiuser mode
#   4 - unused
#   5 - X11
#   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

Actually, on Fedora, it usually says...

id:5:initdefault:		# note the 5 instead of the 3

..but I don't like to assume that X is working when I boot the box.
Old habits die hard :) I log in and type 'startx' from there. 

Anyway, there is probably a number, and there is probably an explanation
of the numbers and runlevels in the comments. Note that runlevels vary
with distribution. You can generally assume that 0 is halt and that 
something high is reboot. You can _not_ assume any of the others are
the same from one distribution to the other, or one day bad things will
happen to you. So you must look at the comments to be sure :) 

If KDE works when you start it from the command line, you can 
probably (but only probably) safely edit this file to have the 
runlevel associated with X11 instead of "full multiuser". If 
things then go wrong, you will need to hit alt and a function 
key to get back to a text console, and edit it back to whatever 
was mostly working before. 

Telsa (been here before; can you tell? :))