Linux: does anyone know how to stop X from starting DURING the boot process? Or from grub (my boot loader)? X screws up because of bad resolution settings, so I can't edit /etc/inittab.

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Linux: does anyone know how to stop X from starting DURING the boot process? Or from grub (my boot loader)? X screws up because of bad resolution settings, so I can't edit /etc/inittab.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Scratch that, ctrl-alt-backspace got me to a console prompt. Now I just have to get my video drivers working, and oh, yeah, somehow get my networking card's drivers to freaking compile.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Well, the network drivers compiled... after I compiled and installed a new kernel.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Ugh...X starting from boot? What distro is that?</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I take it that was the official non-distro kernel you installed?</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Red Hat. But every Linux install I've seen does that.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I honestly don't know. I actually found a page where someone explained the steps they took to get Red Hat 9.0 to dual boot with XP on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop - exactly what I want. The kernel that comes with RH9 had significantly slower disk access - 2.7MB/s versus 21MB/s.</div>

[Anarky]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>rc-update del xfs default try that command</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>If nothing else, get the unaltered kernel from kernel.org.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I can at least turn it off on Mandrake.</div>

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '>hdparm, dude! Distros don't even turn frickin' DMA on, usually.</div>

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '>Is everything okay now?</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>How do you think I checked to see what my disk acess speed was?</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>So can anyone else - edit the /etc/inittab file from id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault:. But if X doesn't work properly, and you're defaulted to start X (option 5), then you're hosed until you can get out of X.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That's probably where I got it from, but I had to apply some patches for the disk acess and battery monitoring stuff - this is a laptop.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Yup, except I'll need to do another kernel compile if I want to be able to check my battery status. I now have a laptop that dual boots XP and Linux.</div>

[Flip]

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>besides the fact that i know its just fun to F with that kind of stuff, what purpose is there to install 2 OS's? Even with all the problems MS OS's have, they still work, and when they dont work it is not that hard to troubleshoot.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I'm a Computer Science graduate student. The entire department here is Linux. All of my programs will have to run under Linux. This is of particular importance for an advanced systems programming class where you're writing programs that are built on top of Unix system commands.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Ugh...I hear laptops can sometimes be a pain with certain laptops on certain Linux installs.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>The install itself went smoothly. But on a fresh install, not all of my screen was used, the networking card didn't work, the disk was slow, and it couldn't see the battery at all.</div>

[Flip]

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>Makes sense, but seems kinda silly to me for a grad school to make people learn something on an OS that is probably used by less than 10% of the population.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Unix based OSes are heavily used in academia, particularly for research of various kinds. When people network 100 machines for parallel processing research, they're not doing it under Windows.

The Unix paradigm is also extremely important theoreticaly (i.e., provide a very small set of basic system calls and build higher level libraries on top of them).

Unix based OSes generally have the best free tools - for programming and for other tasks. Yeah, Visual Studio is a fantastic programming environment, but g++ is a better compiler in general. (Conforms to the standards closer - this I have first hand experience with because of the undergrad research I did last semester. Visual couldn't even compile most of the stuff we had.) After installing Linux, depending on the type of install I did, I can immediately start developing for C, C++, Lisp, Perl, Fortran and other languages I can't think of.

I like Windows. I'm using it right now. It's easier to get things working under Windows - mainly because it has larger support. But Unix based OSes are generally better programming and research environments.</div>

[Flip]

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>Yeah, i tried to take you for a MS hater and instead look like a fool ^_^ i think i'll stick to accounting and leave the programming up to others.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Depends on what you're talking about. Apache/Linux dominates about 60% of the world's web servers.</div>

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '>Er, good question!</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Another reason to not use Red Hat...</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>It's a laptop. I'd be surprised if any distro worked perfectly with a laptop on a fresh install.</div>