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I just installed mandrake 9.0 on this really crappy computer. The Xserver configuration is all messed up and it keeps booting into kde 3. The graphic card is so bad everything is showing up red and very glitchy. I need to get a new graphic card it looks like but I wanna mess with the box and get some stuff ready but I can't find away to boot into the shell. Anyone know how I can do this in mandrake 9.0?
I would try the following:
1. Use CTRL+ALT+F2 to bring up tty2
2. Log in to tty2 as 'root'
3. Edit the file '/etc/inittab' using your editor of choice
4. Find the line id:5:initdefault: and change it to id:3:initdefault:
5. Save the file and exit
6. Restart using the following command '/sbin/shutdown -r now'
When the computer restarts, you will boot to runlevel 3 (Full multiuser mode), instead of runlevel 5 (X11/XWindows).
Which boot loader do you have installed?
I believe both lilo and grub can allow you to boot into a run level. e.g. if your Mandrake partition is called Linux it'd be something like linux=/bin/bash or linux single or linux 1 or linux init 1 (You could alternatively change it to linux 3 or linux init 3 to go to those run levels).
sweeet thanks for your fast reply Stormcr0w. I'm now in happy mode :)