Re: Strange screen cause the system to hang during boot

From: Rod Smith (rodsmith_at_nessus.rodsbooks.com)
Date: 04/05/04 

Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 14:08:58 -0400

In article <68e51b25.0404050051.a6e93c2@posting.google.com>,
        pethunholm@msn.com (Peter) writes:
>
> The screen display: "Localhost login" in textmode. It clears and comes
> up again 3 times and clears and then I get the strange text mode
> window with a light blue background. and a dark blue smaller window.
> In the darkblue rectangel there is two smaller rectangels with text
> gibberish on black bakground inside. (What I called buttons).
> It's my first try with Linux so I dont know how the graphical login
> window is supposed to look?

A text-mode "localhost login:" is a Linux text-mode login prompt. When
the screen clears, chances are the system is TRYING to start X, and when
the "login:" prompt returns, the attempt to start X has failed. Normally,
after a few tries most distributions give up and give you a text-mode
login, but it sounds like something's gone badly wrong and corrupted your
video card's text-mode display by that time.

> I did some google and by means of adding a 3 in the startup sequency I
> managed to boot up linux in text mode. Then the computer stopped at
> the text "localhost login:" and after that it's not possible to do
> nothing. I tried the Ctrl-Alt-F1 hovever nothing happens. Maybe as you
> say it's problem with the keyboard?

Ordinarily at a "login:" prompt you should be able to type your username
at the keyboard to log in. If you can't, then chances are either the
computer's hung or the keyboard's not working. If you haven't tried
typing your username, though, do so. Ctrl-Alt-F1 is what you type to
bring up this very prompt, so if you've done nothing but type
Ctrl-Alt-F1, it's not surprising that nothing's happened. ;-)

> Since the computer doesn't have any original USB card there is a PCI
> usb card installed. Maybe this causing problem for linux? During boot
> sequensy linux say that it's installing USB keyboard and USB mouse, so
> therefore it causing the system to hang or maybe not only takes
> command from the keyboard at the login prompt?

Are you saying you've got a USB keyboard? On the x86 platform, those are
pretty rare. Still, I'd expect RH8 to be recent enough to have decent USB
keyboard support, but maybe not... Does your USB card have a BIOS in
which you can set options? If so, try fiddling with any "legacy keyboard"
options it might have. If not, can you try a PS/2 keyboard? Even just
using one temporarily might let you update your Linux kernel to one with
better USB keyboard support or add appropriate options to enable better
support using the provided software, if that's the problem.

Another option is to use another distribution -- either a more recent one
in the RH line (like Fedora Core 1) or a different one entirely (SuSE,
Mandrake, Debian, or whatever). Unfortunately, I have no specific
suggestions for distributions with good USB keyboard support. Also, one
problem with this approach is that an old 200MHz computer will likely be
very slow with modern versions of KDE and GNOME. You'll want to stick
with older versions of these environments or use slimmer desktop
environments (like XFce) or even raw window managers (like IceWM or
WindowMaker). You can worry about that later, though; for now, the
priority is obviously to get you logged in! 

-- 
Rod Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking