Linux Help, Urgent !!!!

[sw33p0r]

I have tried installing Linux (Mandrake 7.1 and RedHat 7.0) on my system both resulted in a failure to launch XWindows (startx). With Mandrake when the installation get's to configuring X-Windows the screen becomes garbled and it locks the system up so I have to reboot, it installs every other part of Linux though but leaves X-Windows unfunctional. With
RedHat everything installs perfectly but the startx command results in some weird error, what is the problem? Please help me....

 

[Louie1961]

The problem is that your video card is not supported under either of those distros. What you need to do is go to the Nvidia web site (www. nvidia.com I think) and download the appropriate video driver and the GLX driver from Nvidia. Red Hat 7 had xfree86 4.0.XXX included, not sure about the others. If your distro of choice doesn't have the 4.0.xx version of xfree, you will need to download and install that first. Instructions for installing all of that stuff can be found with the various downloads, and are pretty easy. If you use red hat, you can install via the rpm command pretty easily. All of this will have to be done from the command line versus in an x-window. when it comes time to modify your XF86Config file, use the command line text editor, pico.

Also, search these forums, there has been much discussion and help written here on the same subject. The problem is the same with all of the recent Nvidia cards.

By the way, no reason to reboot when x-windows get stuck..just press controll/alt/backspace simultaneously and you will forcefully kill the x-windows session, getting back to the command line.

Good luck.