Thanks to all for all the suggestions.  I finally gave up and did a
re-install and that fixed the problem.  Things worked fine for about an hour
until something went crazy with my optical mouse, as if the left button was
stuck down.  As I dragged the cursor across the screen (and various icons)
windows began popping up all over the place.  I finally had to do a hard
reset of the system.  When I booted linux again it looked okay at first
until I noticed the icon in the lower left corner of my KDE window was gone
(the one containing the shutdown menu pick).  Now I have to reset all the
time to shutdown (I sure there's a better way but I'm too clueless).  Unless
someone knows how to re-add this icon to the menu/command/whatever bar on
the bottom left of the KDE window I think I'll have to re-install again.

Michael Shaw
(816)525-2794
dbwizzard@kc.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: rod <rodbrenda@gbronline.com>
Cc: <kclug@kclug.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2004 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: How do I fix a monitor resolution problem?

> > On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 02:13:46PM -0600, Michael Shaw wrote:
>   You need to get out of X, or boot without startx or a gui.
> >
> > Here are some ideas:
> >
> > 1. When you boot into Linux, if it doesn't hang during the boot process,
> > do you get a graphical login screen? or do you boot run-level 3, log in
> > and then startx? If you get a graphical screen, can you make out enough
> > of the thing to get logged in and then OUT of X to a command prompt? Not
> > through term window, but back to the command prompt. No X.
>
> How about waiting till the boot process is finish then typing
> "cntl-alt-backspace"  to kill X?
> or
> typing "cntl-alt-F2"  to jump to the second console login
> ("cntl-alt-F7" jumps to the first instance of X if it is running
> "cntl-alt-F1  thru F5 are all console logins
> but cntl-alt-F1 may be displaying many messages due to the startup of X)
>
>
> my /etc/inittab file has the following lines:
> # Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
> #   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
> #   1 - Single user mode
> #   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have
> networking)
> #   3 - Full multiuser mode
> #   4 - unused
> #   5 - X11
> #   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
> #
> id:3:initdefault:
>
> I boot to run level 3 and call X as needed with: startx
>
>
>