I'm definitely a Linux newbie, but I'm attempting to install KnoppMyth. I'm having trouble with the dreaded black/blank screen after installation of the nVidia drivers for my GeForce FX5200 card. I've tried everything listed here in the forums, and so far I've been having no success. It would really help if I could figure out how to prevent gdm from trying to start everytime I boot up. I've changed the run level to 3 in inittab, but that doesn't seem to be enough. Could someone tell me how I can boot up to a text screen? Thanks.

mv the S??gdm file in /etc/rc3.d to K??gdm then when you want to go back to it starting move it back.

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Thanks for that. I'll try it when I get home tonight.

Login as root. Edit /etc/inittab. You will see a line that looks like this:

id:5:initdefault;

Change that to:

id:1:initdefault;

Now when you reboot you will come up to runlevel 1 by default. 1 is single-user mode, 5 is multi-user (and 5 also starts gdm).

When you reboot you'll come up to just a plain text console. Login as root from there. To move the system up to runlevel 5 to test your nVidia driver install, enter "telinit 5".

Thus you will always boot into a pretty safe mode (single-user) so that you can hopefully fix any screwups that you find occurring when you (manually) go to multi-user mode.

When you're all done and debugging is complete, go back and modify your /etc/inittab to the way it originally was.

[edit]
p.s. - I see you already changed your startup to boot runlevel 3 by default. I believe the default KnoppMyth installation defines runlevels 2 - 5 as all identical. You can check /etc/rc2.d, /etc/rc3.d, /etc/rc4.d, /etc/rc5.d to see what each runlevel starts up.
[/edit]

Thanks. I'll be trying that as well, although having network access from runlevel 3 is a handy thing. Your post also explains why changing to runlevel 3 was ineffective.

you really probably don't want runlevel 1 as it is great for recovering from serious problems, but is quite limited. If you just remove the S??gdm file from /etc/rc3.d then you can swap back and forth between 3 and 5 and is should work like most other distrobutions do.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets