The incredible disappearing gui

[doralives]

Hope this isn't a dupe. I searched around, and couldn't find anything, so here I go cluttering up the board with my silly problems.

(Knoppix is my first semi-successful go with a Linux distro, and I've been playing with it for a couple of months now, just so you know where I am, ability-wise)

On two separate machines, using both Knoppix 3.7 and 3.8 (from the CeBIT qemu disk), I have successfully installed Knoppix to my hard drive (I LIKE Knoppix. I like the look and feel of it. I've played around with a bunch of other distros and none of them seem as pleasant to work with as Knoppix, and this includes a straight up Debian install) and have gotten it to not only run, but to do things like invoke ndiswrapper, download and install programs using Kilk, and a few other things that give me to believe that I oughtta be able to continue with this neato Linux stuff, but there's a fly in the ointment.

Both machines are oldies (both are backup rigs and my primary will unfortunately continue to run the Dark Lord's OS until I feel rock solid with Linux), with 500mhz cpu's and 196megs of memory, and after the installs have gone swimmingly for a week or three, eventually one fine day I boot up and no longer have a gui. Poof, it's just gone. I can login, but I can't get my gui back. Knoppix loads merrily along, just like always, but in the end, nothing happens when it's time for the gui to show up. I just get a login prompt that takes me into bash, or whatever it is that you get when you don't get a gui, from whence I am presently unable to invoke the Magic Command to a.)make the gui come up, and or b.)make it so it just automagically goes right on into the gui like it's supposed to on the next boot up.

Regards the integrity of the machines, both are happy as clams with the exception of my Knoppix foolishness and the one I'm typing on right now is running off of a spare hard drive that has XPSP2 on it and it's just as rock solid as you could ever ask a machine to be. The Knoppix hard drive for this box is formated using ext2 in case that might matter to someone, with a couple of 5gig primary partitions (Knoppix is on hda1), and a 900meg Linux swap partition.

If anybody out there has ever had a similar thing happen to them, I'd just love to hear all about it. And if anybody knows the Magic Command to bring my gui back, that would be kind of nice to have too.

Kindest thanks in advance.

[Croix]

I had that problem too, when suddenly Knoppix didnt load up X. Solved it by logging in to root and typed:
init 5
Nothing will happen. Then I rebooted and tadaa. Hope it'll work for you also.

[radnor]

See if this helps you.... http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17647

[doralives]

> Solved it by logging in to root and typed: init 5

Well it didn't work Croix, but it worked.

Say what?!?

Well...........I went ahead and tried it. I su'd to root and typed it in, just like you had it. "init 5" Just like you said it would, it did nothing. Then I rebooted and by golly it went right on doing nothing. Repeated the process a couple of times, and nothing happened. Tried it as nonroot and was promptly informed that I had to do it from root, so something down inside the machine was at least listening to me.

Got tired of repeating myself, and played around with telling LILO to use the 2.6 kernal and a few other odds and ends, and it always came back leaving me there in bash, with no gui.

Quit playing around with it, and went back to just attempting it straightaway (yes, I AM a mindlessly persistent type sometimes), and on one of the subsequent reboots, midway through the scrolling words as things were waking up, it all of a sudden decided on it's own that hda1 hadn't been checked in "30 boots" and that by golly it was going to "force" a check.

Which it did, tra la la.

Once the check rolled all the way up to 100percent, and it (whatever IT was) was happy with things, the boot picks up right where it left off and lots more words scrolled by, telling me all the usual wonderful things, and when it got to the part where it had been hanging with a login prompt before, it kinda blinked for a second, and all of a sudden here's Mister GUI from out of nowhere, acting like he'd never been gone.

So I just go with the flow, fire up the wifi, and here I am. (By the way, is there a way for me to automate the Knoppix>Network/Internet>Network Card Configuration process?)

No, I do NOT have the slightest idea what happened, nor what I did.

Do you?

Does anybody?

I'm almost curious enough to reboot the machine right now, just to see what it does. But not quite. Got a few more web pages to visit first.

> See if this helps you.... http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17647

Went to it Radnor, and saw lots of wonderful things, but I really don't know which one of the wonderful things in there it was that you were referring to. Apologies for being less than fully swift, but I suppose that's why I'm here in the first place, pestering all you nice people with my foolishness.

[radnor]

Well heres what I did to get the GUI back...


Here's what I did. When I logon in TEXT mode, I entered a command "STARTX". The GUI did come up
but, the font size was all wrong (and BG color). I also noticed, when I went to LOGOUT, the options presented were different. (There were 2 not the normal 3 or 4 --- I think shutdown was NOT there) Well, I shut it down (pulled plug) and
rebooted. This time it came up like NORMAL. This AM I started to recreated the whole process again. But did not
have time to totally finish (had to get kid to school).


Did not know if you could have entered STARTX. Don't know if it would have done anything for you.

[doralives]

> When I logon in TEXT mode, I entered a command "STARTX"

Ahhhhhh........very good. Apologies for being a dunderhead and not seeing this, even as it was staring me in the face. Many thanks, Radnor.

I'll file that little tidbit away for future use, because so far this machine continues to run swimmingly, going directly into the gui on every boot (so far) since it "checked" and "forced" earlier.

[JPsDad]

I described my very similar problem in the thread that Radnor linked. My user account accounts boot to a login box, where all the login accounts are listed. If I select one of the user accounts, the X window goes away, then is reloaded, then the "Login at Box", and finally the background returns. This will repeat ad nausium. However, if I select Root, then the KDE Desktop Environment is loaded. I have tried going to runlevel 2 (Ctrl-Alt-2) and entering startx. It doesn't work as a user, but does as root.

[radnor]

I described my very similar problem in the thread that Radnor linked. My user account accounts boot to a login box, where all the login accounts are listed. If I select one of the user accounts, the X window goes away, then is reloaded, then the "Login at Box", and finally the background returns. This will repeat ad nausium. However, if I select Root, then the KDE Desktop Environment is loaded. I have tried going to runlevel 2 (Ctrl-Alt-2) and entering startx. It doesn't work as a user, but does as root.


When I did the STARTX, I was at a TEXT (bash) login prompt. I could not see "Login at Box".