Booting with a disconnected network cable causes all sorts of strange behavior. mac mini kernel 2.6.11-1.1177_FC4 gdm-2.6.0.7-5 xorg-x11-6.8.2-13 [bhughes@minimac ~]$ cat /etc/hosts # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost minimac [bhughes@minimac ~]$ eth0 uses dhcp I set up a cronjob that checks the network connection every five minutes so I can login viz ssh with the machine in a locked up state. I will probably look to see if there is a way to setup a usb console next since there is no serial port. runlevel 5 : X is just a blank screen. login screen never displays. Nothing I do from the keyboard works. connecting via ssh after connecting the nic I can see that gdm launches X but no X never runs anything. Once this happens if I reboot into runlevel 3, the screen is shifted to the left and lines in the console are missing the leftmost characters. Booting into runlevel 3 after shutting the machine down and booting into runlevel 3 the console looks normal and I can log in ok but startx still hangs Any Ideas? Could there be something needing a dns lookup? Bret