Every time I installed Linux on an older PC, the GUI installation worked fine during installation, but then the graphical login screen didn’t appear when I rebooted the PC for the first time after installation. Instead, I ended up with a text login screen or a black screen with a small ‘X’ in the middle, or the boot process seemed to hang with a gray screen. If this problem happens to you,here’s how you can troubleshoot it.
1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot the PC.
The PC starts to boot. You get to a screen where GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) prompts you for the operating system to boot. (If the distribution uses LILO as the boot loader, you get a text prompt.)
2. For GRUB, press the A key to add an option that tells the Linux kernel to boot to a prompt. For LILO, skip this step.
The GRUB boot loader then displays a command line for the Linux kernel and prompts you to add what you want.
3. For GRUB, type a space followed by the word single and press Enter. For LILO, type linux single and press Enter.
The Linux kernel boots in a single-user mode and displays a prompt that looks like the following:
sh-3.00#
Now you’re ready to configure X.
X uses a configuration file (XF86Config-4 or xorg.conf, depending on the distribution) to figure out your display card, your monitor, and the kind of screen resolution you want. The Linux installer prepares the configuration file, but sometimes the configuration isn’t correct.
To quickly create a working configuration file, follow these steps:
1. Type the following command:
X -configure
The X server runs and creates a configuration file. The screen goes blank and then the X server exits after displaying some messages. In Fedora, the last line of the message says the following:
To test the server, run ‘X -config ///etc/xorg.conf.new’
2. Use a text editor, such as vi, to edit the ///etc/xorg.conf.new file and insert the following line after the line Section “Files”:
FontPath “unix/:7100”
In Fedora, you must also change /dev/mouse to /dev/input/mice.
3. Type xfs & to start the X font server.
4. Try the new configuration file by typing X -config ///etc/xorg.conf.new. If you see a blank screen with an X-shaped cursor, the configuration file is working fine.
5. Press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to kill the X server.
6. Copy the new configuration file to the /etc/X11 directory with the following command:
cp ///etc/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
7. Reboot the PC by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete or typing reboot.
If all goes well, you should get the graphical login screen.
The X configuration file created by using the -configure option of the X server does not display at the best resolution. To fine-tune the configuration file, you have to run a utility to adjust the display settings after you reboot the system. Which utility you use depends on the Linux distribution, but most distributions include a utility that enables you to configure the video card, monitor, and display settings through a graphical user interface.
0 comments