Text Mode-HELP PLEASE

[Mike Parson]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 12:29:44PM -0800, Gavin wrote:
> I?ve done all the options I could find to boot in to text mode. All I get is
> this for everything I enter under boot: Have a look here
> http://arri.spymac.net/boot.gif This pic  I hope will help you understand.

>From the yaboot prompt, when it says "press tab for boot options" or
something along those lines...

Hit tab and you should get a list of kernels that yaboot is configured
to boot, type the name of one of them followed by the word 'single'
at the : prompt, it might look something like this (this is all from
memory, please forgive the inaccuracies) (this is also asuming a
new-world mac):

....

Press tab for options or wait for default

yaboot: <tab>

Linux    linux-2.4.18-5 some.thing.else

yaboot: Linux single

....


This should boot you into single-user mode, which is also a text mode,
no X.  If you also need multi-user mode (networking, multiple consoles,
etc), type "telinit 3" at the single-user shell prompt and it will
finish booting up to "full" text mode Linux.  Log in and fix what you
need to fix.

If you're on an old-world mac and using BootX, from the screen when
it's giving you a chance to boot into MacOS or Linux, IIRC, there's a
check-box to boot single-user, from there you can follow the rest of the
above instructions to get to init-level 3.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org