Can't get to login screen

[maestrobwh1]

I used synaptic to fix broken packages, and now linux boots fine, goes to runlevel 6 as usual, but then drops to a shell for login rather than to the usual login screen. I can log in to the text shell, but don't know how to get into KDE or gnome. I assume it is a command I need to initiate.

Help?

[ockham23]

You probably mean runlevel 5 (6 is "reboot"). If commands such as init 5, startkde or startx don't work, there's something wrong with the xserver. Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log to find possible errors. You could also try to reconfigure the xserver: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Frankly, Knoppix isn't designed for hd install because upgrading packages is likely to break the system. You should consider switching to another distro like Kanotix.

[maestrobwh1]

I have multiple O/S's on my computer including Kubuntu, DamnSmallLinux and, gasp windows 2000, which gets the least use. My knoppix install was my first Linux experience and worked quite nicely but I got "experimental" and wanted to install Adept package manager because it takes care of dependencies unlike Kpackage. The install for that was broken so I tried to use Synaptic (I guess this is more for Gnome?) to fix it. I found that during the upgrade, the package xserver-xorg had actually been removed and the upgrade failed before it installed the new versions of everything. (your suggestions got me farther- a white screen with a mouse but no desktop), but I did an apt-get install, and of course... dependency issues. Currently, I am running apt-get upgrade on it to see what happens. It isn't a big deal, as I pretty much have Kubuntu the way I want it.

Just for my learning: Is there a way to force apt-get to look for dependencies and fix them during an install? Is that what the -f switch is supposed to do?