How to access shell locally?

[Ishware]

This is a linux-newbie type question... Sorry. :-(

I have a CentOS box that I have local access to (working on a local project and talked them into using cPanel... heh) -- it was configured to use a graphical GUI; when we installed cPanel, the gui is no longer working-- which is fine, in and of itself - I don't need a gui (although would be nice)....

But now I can't figure out how to have *any* local shell... X tries to come up and can't, and after it can't, there's what appears to be the last bits of the boot on the screen, and........ nothing.

Box is working perfectly -- but how can I get to a shell? As said, don't care if it's gui or command line...

Thank you for your consideration!

 

[krava]

Hello.

I advise you to boot your box in a single mode and disable X server at all, then reboot the box. I think you will get a login prompt and access to a default shell if X is disabled.

 

[tweakservers]

Cpanel may have issues if there's any GUi modules being loaded, disabling or uninstalling will be a wise option.

 

[eth00]

Have you looked into Webmin? It is another control panel but it can do most of the functions X windows can do but via a web interface - instead of X.

cPanel is also nice but webmin is focused on more for the entire server.

As others have said if you are looking at putting this box into production X is a bad idea. If you do need check the logs and see what it is saying went wrong.

 

[brianoz]

You may be able to work around this problem by switching screens. Try out the ALT-F1, ALT-F2, ALT-F3 through ALT-F12 keys and you may find that some of them are running login screens.

Alternatively try running a Windows ssh client such as PuTTy. You should be able to use that directly to connect to port 22.

If both of those fail, then you'll need to boot into single user mode to fix things up -- good luck!