loginwindow drops to console Darwin login (no Gui)

Hi,

I just realized I underestimated my MacBook pro Intel... My os is 10.4.8 and not 10.3.9... due to this I am reposting in the appropriate forum... (even if it seems to me that this sort of problems occurred also with previous versions of OsX)



Hi all,
I am new to the apple forum (and new to mac Os... I usually work in a gentoo linux environment). And, since having updated system software, My mac book pro drops to the nongraphical system console right after I enter the password in the graphical login window.

With some googling I have seen that quite a few mac users are having the same problem... so I tried ALL the solutions suggested (like rebuilding the netinfo database, repairing permissions with diskutils etc etc...)

The last lines of my system.log are, as all others with my same problem, roughly like this:

Oct 4 05:49:02 soyu crashdump151: SecurityAgent crashed
Oct 4 05:49:03 soyu loginwindow95: AuthorizationRef doesn't have a username (<LoginAuthRefMgr: 0x3385b0>).\n

(I think this is the relevant part.... does not seem to me that the crashdump log add any relevant info)

ALL others with the same problem seem to have reverted to an Archive and Install... Might be my Linux way of thinking, but:

I am sure that there must be a possibility to solve this problem without having to reinstall all config data (the reinstall to fix philosophy is one of the things that turned me away from Windows a lot of time ago)

(I have also bootcamp installed with WinXP + parallels with linux and winXP, plus fink with a whole lot of unix dev tools.... It would take me to much time)

Does anyone have any suggestion ?


...
I also have another problem:

I am trying to connect remotely to my "console only" mac, but the net is down... (I switched off AirPort just before the software update... after the update process finished asking me to reboot, I got the BSD login screen as said above)

So, reading the "command line OsX guide" I am trying to reenable AirPort and connect to my home network (so I can try doing something from my other PC, the one I'm using now).

the commands I issued are the following (I have to manually write them, since I have no network)

prompt > sudo ./networksetup-panther -setairportpower on
You cannot set AirPort power because all AirPort network services are disabled.

ok... so I have to enable services....

prompt > sudo ./networksetup-panther -setnetworkserviceenabled AirPort on
prompt > sudo ./networksetup-panther -getnetworkserviceenabled Airport
Enabled
prompt > sudo ./networksetup-panther -setairportpower on
You cannot set AirPort power because all AirPort network services are disabled.

... uhhh !? (maybe I am missing something ?)

by the way, I found yesterday a file (that I can't find anymore now) telling me that among the updates were also AirPort sw and Firmware... (do not know if this helps...)

I have also tried creating a new user using dscl... once I am in interactive mode I can cd to NetInfo, but, as soon as I type cd Users the graphical GUI tries to start and, after one or two minutes drops me back to the console.