FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Jim Cornette]

Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

>Ok, here is what I recall....
>
>1) Starting from scratch, insert the boot cd
>2) Select the linux text, to do a text-based installation
>3) Follow all the steps, choose your software (I chosed 'everything')
>4) When it reboots one of two things came up for me:
>  a) At first, Grub reported a text-based message: "GRUB>"
>     So, I was perplexed and did not know what to do.  So,
>     instead of trying to solve this one, I chosed to reboot
>     with the Fedora Rescue disc
>  
>
Good choice. When you boot into the rescue mode, after chrooting, you 
might be able to run grub-install /dev/<boot-device> - (whatever device)
This usually corrects grub when I had problems in the past.

>  b) After the second time I re-installed from scratch, grub
>     came up find with the splash screen and all that, but then
>     when I came to figuring out how to modify grub to boot runlevel
>     3, it was (and still is) not possible to me to figure out this
>     step.  Please reply and tell me how this one is done please
>     so that I know how?  Of course this would be the easiest place
>     to get into runlevel 3 and yum update and my problems could have
>     been MUCH easier.
>  
>
Basically, press a key to unhide the menu when grub displays. Then you 
would highlight the kernel you desired and press the "a" key to display 
the boot line. You would want to backspace out the "rhgb quiet" portion 
of the line out, then add a spacebar followed by the number 3. Press 
enter and you should be booting into runlevel 3.
Login at the terminal (root of course), you should be in runlevel 3.

>5) Fedora Rescue mode
>  a) Hit 'Enter', the default mode
>  b) Drivers are loaded (if any), then choose language, then keyboard
>     and anaconda starts up.
>  c) "Setup Networking" appears
>     Choose 'Yes', then configure as needed (I choosed manual, not DHCP)
>     and added the IP address and mask., Click 'OK' then complete by
>     adding the gateway, primary, secondary, tertiary as needed and
>     click 'OK'
>  d) In 'Rescue', choose: 'Continue' (it will attempt to find the sysimage)
>     and allow you to mount the sysimage if found.  I haven't tried the directly
>     to command shell mode at any time.
>  e) Mount the sysimage: chroot /mnt/sysimage
>  f) Now, you are "in" the environment (whatever it is), and you may think that
>     you are in single user mode but you have networking active.... so... you
>     may think that you can yum update here.... right?
>  
>

You would assume that you now have a runlevel 1. You are right though, 
things are not the same as runlevel 1. I don't know if you could telinit 
into a runlevel 3 or not from rescue mode. I never tried it before. 
Rescue mode does not bring in services and device nodes from my 
experience with chrooted environments.

>     Well... *some* files do yum install - but others that as it seems to me
>     mostly the ones with library installations appear to send out error messages
>     that the scriptlets are failing and messages in the errors shows the %prenum,
>     %postnum type messages.
>
>Hope this helps....
>  
>
Thanks for the "trial by fire" feedback.

Jim

>Dan
>  
>