Red Hat 9, Keyboard NoGo

[vwgtiturbo]

Well, I finally ran into my first problem. I am sure it is something small, but I am clueless... I was logged on as a user and had my fstab file open to view it. When I went to edit the file, I pushed the keys and nothing happened. The computer simply made a loud beeping noise at me. No matter what I do under this user profile, the computer just beeps when I hit the keyboard. Now, if I use the mouse to get logged out, and re-login as root, or any other user, the keyboard works just fine. I went to the control center, and under the 'Peripherals' tab, checked to see if I had inadvertently muffed something up, but all was good... This sucks...

[babbing]

Try running through the keyboard config again. the cli command is redhat-config-keyboard.

i don't have too much to work with here, so maybe you could get into the application menu, and then got to system tools, then choose system logs. check the xfree86 log and hte sytem log for anything related to the keyboard and post it up here. Hopefull that will get us somewhere on this.

[vwgtiturbo]

Something else that was interesting was that when I would log out of that user with the mouse, I would return to the log in screen, but instead of being blue and having the hat logo and reboot/system options, the whole screen was gray, except the area where you input your name and password. It was a white box, as it should be. Oh well... I had just set the user up, so I went ahead and deleted the user, then recreated the user and all is good. Thanks for the help though...

[babbing]

It is funny that you should mention that, because that happens to me on the laptop. I would recommend that you set the computer to runlevel 3, and not deal with all that mumbo jumbo.

[vwgtiturbo]

This is where my Linux newbie-ness shows... run level 3? I think that has something to do with the INIT 3 that shows up in all of the startup stuff (?) but have no idea what it actually is.

[trommaster]

yep, thats right.
there are 3 main runlevels [i guess...]
init 1 = recovery mode
init 3 = text mode
init 5 = graphical mode

it is changed by editing the line in the file /etc/inittab that reads:
id:3:initdefault:

to 3, 5 whatever.
as you can see, i leave mine at 3 which is text mode.
to start X, you just login and type startx at the prompt.

[babbing]

another handy utility is switchdesk. If you switch to runlevel three, and want to use a wm other than your default, say kde, you can use 'switchdesk gnome' to set you desktop to gnome, then use startx to start it.

[vwgtiturbo]

Cool Thanks for the tips. I may have to do that (switch default to 3) with my second system. I take it to both of my jobs in case I have some downtime (talk about one helluva heavy 'laptop'), that way I can be half way productive. However, when I hook it up, I get an Xconfig fault, and it attempts to reconfigure X to account for the new monitor. Well the reconfig never works... it just goes through the process, gets another X server fail and tries to reconfig X again, just a viscious cycle. So, I am assuming that if init 3 was the run level, X server would not start? Then I may not get an error and I could at least do some stuff at the command line level.

[SkyNet]

Right at run level 3 X will not start, and you can fix any problems from the command line.

[trommaster]

if your computer boots by default into runlevel 5, you can change it at the boot loader.

for lilo:
type the name followed by 3, eg 'linux 3'

grub:
choose entry and press 'e' to edit, choose the longest line (will have stuff about kernel, root etc and press 'e' again, move to end of line and add 3, press enter to temporarily save then 'b' to boot