Flashing terminal

[Kevin Buettner]

On Mar 11,  9:42am, steve wrote:

> I was over at a friends house last nite who wants to run a linux system on
> one of his machines.  He installed Red Hat 6.2 by following the
> instructions through the installation. I watched as the system seem to boot
> up with no prob, but after getting to the Login prompt, after about 30
> seconds the Login prompt at all the text would just dissappear and reappear
> continuously.  It was not in a timed manner but more random, and quite
> rapidly.  It was comical watching him try to type in his login name and
> password, as it would only take keyboard input during the intervals while
> the login prompt was on the screen.

I think what you're seeing is X automatically attempting to start up,
fail, and cycle again...  I've seeing behavior like this in the past
too.  (I.e. it's not a hardware problem.)

The solution is to wait on the X configuration until after the install.
It is much easier to diagnose what's going on if you run startx from
a shell and redirect the output to a file.

Kevin