I am new to UNIX administration and

[johngiggs]

I am new to UNIX administration and I am currently testing on a Linux box. How do you bring up the GUI? I believe it is called GNU? I rebooted the system and now I can only get the command line.

Thanks,

John

 

[Morsing]

The GUI is called X. Try the command 'startx'.

If you want always to start, check if there's a line in /etc/inittab starting with 'x'.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[sleipnir214]

The GUI is an open-source version of Xwindow called XFree86. Xwindow can use any of a myriad of window managers, including KDE, Gnome, and others. Since the current version of the Xwindow system is version 11, Xwindow is often referred to simply as X11.

To start the GUI from a command prompt, issue the command "startx" (minus, of course, the quotes). You will use startx to start the Xwindow system, regardless of the window manager used.

You can also set up a linux box to start the GUI automatically on boot. You do this by editing /etc/inittab. Check the first lines of the file, particularly the comments, for more information. Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[johngiggs]

Thanks for the quick response, Morsing and sleipnir214. I started the GUI using the startx command. I noticed that in /etc/inittab that there was the following line:

x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

Should this be changed if I want x to start on boot up?

Thanks,

John

 

[Morsing]

No don't change it. The second number shows which runlevel start it up. At the top of the file there's a line saying 'initdefault' and a number.
If that number is '5' something else is wrong. If it's not five, change it to five. Then it will start all the lines in the inittab file with a '5' in the second field.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support