Russell Davie wrote:
> Hi
> I had a go at updating my box from mdk 7.2 to 8.2 over the WE, but
> things have gone horribly wobbly.
Ok, just so I can get a better idea of what's going on, how did you do
the upgrade? CDs? URPMI? downloading RPMS and manually installing?
and did you do an "install" over an existing copy or an "upgrade"?
were there any errors during the upgrade?
>
> the X server is not starting up after shutting down last night, and
> before I quit I've noticed a new user on the system called 'nobody'....
the nobody user is perfectly normal. It's just a normal user account
that stuff like apache et al uses so that it doesn't have to run as root.
Did you have X set up to start automatically previously?
take a look in
/var/log/XFree86.*
and see what it says. It might give you an error which gives us
somewhere to start from.
Alternatively, if it is starting X on boot, log in as super-user on a
console, switch to runlevel 3 with "init 3" and run "startx", see what
happens.
>
> I can't log in as root, and can only log in as su after I first log in
> as a user,
ok, that's probably a security setting. There's a number of places you
can do that sort of thing. What's in your /etc/securetty file?
I suspect you changed the mandrake security level when you did the
upgrade. Probably the easiest course of action is to get X running again
and use "drakconf" (which I have just discovered is broken on my
system), which I think has got an interface that lets you select the
security level relatively easily (it's also got a cute little software
installer/upgrader thing which might help you with upgrading stuff and
staying up to date)
>
> maybe I've been hacked when upgrading rpm while downloading?
mmm.. pretty unlikely. Or rather no more likely than any other day. :)
>
> may I get a copy of mandrake cds so this mess can be cleaned up?
Depending on your install method it may or may not help. Let us know a
bit more about the problem and we can take it from there.
James.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
