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.