On Monday 08 November 2010 16:34:18 Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/11/08 14:17 (GMT+0200) Stan Goodman composed:
A reboot brought the system to its present state, which is that the desktop is now up partially. The chameleon is still there, with the progress gauge (with no progress), but the upper-left quadrant is occupied by the Desktop Folder window. neither the folder nor the rest of the screen is populated.
This would seem to be progress. What I would like to do is to run fsk on sda7 again, but I am unsure how to reboot, since there is no button to do so, and I am reluctant to screw things up again by using the OFF switch. Actually, I think that switch does an orderly shutdown before removing power, but I would like to be sure.
1-Switch to 1 of your 6 virtual consoles (Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6]; e.g. Crtl-Alt-F2) 2-login as root 3A-init 6 # reboot, or 3B-init 3 # shut down X 4-fsck /dev/sda7 # what you wish 5-init 5 # restart X
If a reboot or X restart does not fix X, try: 6-Switch to 1 of your 6 virtual consoles (Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6]; e.g. Crtl-Alt-F2) 7-login as root # if not still logged in from #2 above 8-init 3 # shut down X 9-zypper up # refreshes repos & updates installed packages to latest versions 10-init 5 # restart X 11-report back
As an alternative to #3A, reboot from root login can also be accomplished using the reboot command, or the shutdown command, both of which have man pages.
Also, telinit can be substituted for any instance above of init, which also has a man page explaining what the init/telinit numbers mean. e.g., 3 produces runlevel 3, which is full system function except for anything that requires X to work.
Any time you need to reboot while X is dysfunctional, you can prevent having X start by appending any of single, 1, 2 or 3 to the kernel line while in the Grub menu or from a Grub prompt. Then after performing repairs to the X system, init 5 will attempt to start X and bring up the GDM/KDM/XDM login screen.
To test if your window manager is working without bothering with the login screen, you can login from any of the virtual consoles as any regular user (or root if you dare), then run the command startx. Done this way if the display manager is still not producing a menu that allows you to exit, you can kill X completely with Ctrl-Alt-BS Ctrl-Alt-BS.
I was prepared this morning to proceed according to your suggestions, but v11.3 seems to have booted to completion, with a populated desktop and all the apps that were loaded weeks ago running. Remembering that the system ran well when I was able to boot from the GRUB prompt, without evident graphic problems, I think it would be worth a try to continue to use it now, until if and when such problems appear. What I see from the reports of problems with 11.3 on Intel boards is that many of them concern either laptops or Nvidia cards, neither of which is the case here. So I think and hope that the problems are straightened out. Felix, I am greatly indebted to you for your advice and guidance, not to mention your patience. From my own point of view, I have learned quite a lot about the booting process and about GRUB that I wouldn't have learned had the original problem not occurred, so it certainly has not been a waste of time for me. WARNING: Anyone who switches my drives in the future will be shot, whether it was me or anyone else. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org