I had been having some trouble logging on to one my computers here at home. It is an old Pentium 3 system and I had installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 “Karmic Koala” on it. I was getting quite frustrated because the graphical logon would frequently fail for no reason I could figure out. Worse, I could find nothing like it on Google. Uniqueness is sometimes overrated….

Falling back on my experience with Slackware I decided to replace the graphical (gdm) logon screen with a text-based console logon, just like in the good old days :-)> Finding out how to do this proved to be harder than I had expected, but I eventually found a way to boot into console/command line when startup Ubuntu 9.10 by altering the configuration file for GRUB, the boot program.

A couple other changes:

• This old PC really does not have enough power to run GNOME fast enough, so I replaced that by Fluxbox.
• I also changed the box from DHCP to a Static IP Address

One puzzling thing: At one point I got so frustrated with Ubuntu that I tried setting up a Debian system. Both the full CD images and the net install CD hung early in the process for no apparent reason. The CD’s were burned on the same machine as my Ubuntu and other CD’s, so I doubt there is a media problem. I will try them on another machine when I get a chance.