h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have just upgraded 2 machines (at different sites) with amd k6(2) 300 MHz processors to run mandrake 8.2.

one has 64 Mb of memory, the other has 32Mb.

as you can imagine the one with 32 didn't like KDE, but kde was so slow on it that it was completely unusual.

trying to fix this, the mouse response times seem to have resulted in something being changed (presumably in some configuration file that I have not found yet) which results in some very funny behaviour.

Whatever the fault is, it seems to be overriding the runlevel (from console to X login) and lilo's menu option (from text menu and prompt to graphics menu without prompt).

logout of X seems to restrt it again giving you a choice of "sessions" which include different window managers like icewm.

any ideas what is going on?

Some places to check are /etc/inittab to make sure the default runlevel hasn't been changed to X (5 on my RH box) as that starts xdm and when you logout it restarts it. If it has just change the default runlevel back to whatever you want.

I will check that, as it does exlain some of the behaviour.

but why doen't changing the runlevel in linuxconf reset it?

also what can be overiding lilo.conf?

Have you run /sbin/lilo since the initial install?

Have you tried to change the runlevel using 'init' to change the runlevel manually instead of through linuxconf?
Not sure why changing it in linuxconf doesn't work unless it's been defined that X starts for all your runlevels (check in rc*.d).

good suggestions people.

I will be on site in about 12 hours, and will check them then.

I will get back to you with the results.

ps I didn't realise that you could force x to start automatically in ALL run levels. still, this is linux we are talking about, so why not.

You can force anything to start in any run level - stick the right script in the rc*.d directory and it'll get run. Or put it into the rc.local script.

Ah the joys of unix startup sequences

well, I fixed a couple of things, and it resolved itself, but I still can't figure out why it played up in the first place.

After all, the stuff I fixed was not related to either lilo, or X windows, so why should fixing it make a difference?

What did you change? I agree it seems strange that it wasn't to do with X or the startup, but if it works it works