www.pitonyak.org

My operating system of choice is Fedora and I have it running on multiple computers. One of the computers has the partition containing the "home" directories encrypted, so I am required to enter a password every time the computer boots. It is common for this machine to boot to a blank screen.

All the machines are running nVidia based cards of some sort with the proprietary driver. The machine that constantly causes me problems is an HP Z600 Workstation, which has what appears to be non-standard parts. The machine works well enough, but I don't care for the layout inside the case (for my uses). I don't know if the problem is related to the video card that came with the machine or if it is because things stall while Fedora waits for me to enter a password to allow access to the drive.

Luckily, the solution is simple enough.

Use Ctrl+Alt+F5 to switch to a text console, login as root, enter the command "init 3" (to enter run-level 3 without graphics, which logs you out), login as root, enter the command "init 5" (to enter run-level 5 with graphics), and then carry on as normal.