[colug-432] FC12: How to kill graphical boot?

[Joshua Kramer]

Howdy Fellow Coluggers,

I seem to have caught myself in a quandary.  In lamenting the long time until 
the release of RHEL6, and wanting to exercise some of the new SELinux features 
contained therein, I bit the bullet and downloaded Fedora Core 12... but I 
can't get into my newly installed system.

The box in question is an older P4 running CentOS 5.  It resides in a 
rarely-used corner of the basement and therefore it is headless.  I had planned 
to install FC12 as a Xen DOMU.  (This processor is so old it does not have the 
hardware virtualization support, so KVM is out of the question...)

I downloaded the ISO and mounted it under /media/cdrom on the host.  Then I 
made its directory available via apache so I could do an automated install to a 
Xen virtual host.  Everything installed properly, and I got a nice graphical 
login via the Xen console.

But seeing that there are already 3 other VM's on this hardware box, I wanted 
to ditch the graphics.  I therefore edited /etc/inittab so that it boots into 
runlevel 3, and bounced the machine.

The result?  On the console, the graphical boot screen is stuck even after the 
boot process is complete.  In the graphical console, using Alt+F2 or 
Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch consoles does not work.  If I drop to the command line 
and do:

/usr/sbin/xm console websec1

...then I get the first two lines of the Linux kernel boot process.  So I did 
some google searching and reading:

http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/65-Wednesday-Why-rhgb-Graphical-Boot-Screen.html

...and noted that I could remove 'rhgb' from the command line to get the 
graphical boot to go away.  After doing so, the text console got a bit farther 
in the boot process, and then the last thing I see is this:

dracut: Mounted root filesystem /dev/xvda3
dracut: Loading SELinux policy
type=1404 audit(1269974595.158:2): enforcing=1 old_enforcing=0 auid=4294967295 
ses=4294967295
type=1403 audit(1269974596.023:3): policy loaded auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295
dracut: Switching root

Then, nothing.

Is there some way I can connect to one of the other virtual consoles (what you 
would get if you hit Alt+F2) or get init to stop switching the root console?

Thanks!
-Josh

BTW I do not have any network connectivity into this box.

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