I have a Red Hat GUI through a terminal server. I can log in to the server because the login screen has the focus but once I log in, I am unable to use the mouse to select anything. I believe that no mouse is connected through the term server. So I have a desktop but no way to select anything. I've tried a bunch of key combinations and nothing's working.

Does anyone have any idea how I can bring up a menu or select one of the icons (like the console/terminal icon on the menu bar) when I don't have a mouse?

The $@&$$%^$ idiots who rebuilt this box a few days ago, built it to start in run level 5. I'd love to find them and kick the living %@^# out of them, but there's a problem on the server and my only way in is via the term server.

Damn this is irritating. In Windows I can alt+enter or alt+space or even fricking tab from item to item and eventually get to something I can use. Fricking Linux GUI is graphical hell.

Forgive me for the irritation. It's 3am and I've been up for an hour looking on line for an answer so I'm a little short.

Thanks for any help.

Carl

Ok, while I wasn't able to work the GUI through the console, I was able to hit ctrl+alt+f3 to get to a regular login window. But if anyone knows of a way to use the keyboard only in a Red Hat GUI, I'd be forever grateful.

Carl

Gnome desktop has the so-called accessibility feature and support "keyboard mouse", to use your numeric keypad for mouse emulation. I think you can find it from the mouse Gnome configuration menu. I just set this up on a new FC6 box a couple of days ago and I hope my memory is still fresh on this one.

Or, you can try login remotely by XDMCP. For a testing server with X-Windows but no mouse or keyboard, I enable XDMCP at gdm, open the relevant port (177 udp, I think) at the firewall, and then I can open the gdm from another desktop machine that has a mouse+keyboard and use it remotely with the local mouse/keyboard. This combination works great.

The problem is that the network wasn't available. We're using Hummingbird to access a Citrix server which gives me access via IE to a Avocent application which gives me console access to the server. It works well, especially for my Solaris systems but mainly because they aren't running a window system. So having a remote access desktop wouldn't have working in this situation. It's not that I wanted a remotely accessible desktop, but I needed to access a term so I could find out what the problem was with the server.

I don't know what window manager was being used. I've used Gnome before and none of the icons looked like it or like the KDE. It basically looked liked the regular Red Hat desktop.

How do you activate this accessibility feature? Is it on automatically or do I need to actually activate something?

Ultimately the problem was the boneheads who built the server didn't use the same IP address and didn't put any of the accounts back. The two accounts they did put back weren't the same UID's as on the old server (old=500, new=501). The first call at 9pm was because the mainframe guys didn't know what the IP address was, the second call at 2:15am was because the permissions were incorrect (can't overwrite the old file). Monday we'll be having a discussion with the customer.

Thanks again for the pointers.

Carl