I installed Fedora 12 but when I try to boot it I get the command line not the GUI. I have logged on as root and tried typing "startx" but it says command not found. I think it might have something to do with my video card. My video card is a old 3Dlabs VX1 using 3Dlabs own GPU. I had it working with Redhat 9.0 before trying to install Fedora. How can I configure the video card driver? Anything else I should be looking at?

Also before installing Fedora I had a dual boot with Win98 and Redhat 9. When I installed Fedora I selected the option to replace an existing Linux installation. It now boots directly into Fedora without giving me an option to start Windows. Did I wipe out my Windows installation or is something not working with the boot loader?

did you install a gui?
Try typing in

In the grub screen, the bottom choice labelled as "Other" will boot to Windows.

If the grub screen does not show up when your booting, get to the command line and type:

su -c "nano /boot/grub/grub.conf" and change the timeout from 0 to 3, and put a hash mark in front of hiddenmenu, then reboot.

By default F12 should have installed Gnome by default unless you unchecked the option during installation.

I tried both X -version and su -c "nano /boot/grub/grub.conf" in the command line and both said command not found. I pressed the down arrow key repeatably while the computer was booting and go the grub screen to show up but it didn't have any choice except Fedora. I have tried reinstalling it again. When I was installing Fedora I saw a note flash across the bottom of the screen that said something like you don't have enough memory to run the GUI installer. I have 256mb of memory. I thought 192mb was all that was needed for the GUI.

are you sharing video memory from that 256MB RAM? or does your card have it's own memory? Anyway, sounds like X isn't being installed. This is what Desktop Environments such as KDE and Gnome run on top of. If X isn't there, you have no GUI.

that old computer ( win 98 on it ) has far too little ram to run a modern operating system
you MIGHT get xfce to install but i dought it

i am also surprised that fedora 12 ( in text mode) even installed .

My video card has its own 32mb of ram. What is the minimum ram required to run Fedora 12?

256 is the bare min. But firefox will use 80 meg of ram all by it's self
and as i type this my system is using 300 meg
512 meg will work but very slowly
the release notes ?
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/releas...12/en-US/html/

Hardware Requirements
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/releas...e_Requirements

and the install guide
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/instal...12/en-US/html/

I gave up and installed Ubuntu 9.1. It is working but a bit slow.

It should run slow (Ubuntu) - you're actually fortunate that its running at all. You still going to have issues where things like Firefox and X will themselves use up most of your memory.

In my opinion you have 2 choices - either upgrade your system or switch back to the CLI version of your preferred distro (be it Fedora or Ubuntu). Long term if you continue to use Ubuntu even, you're going to find that your system crashes a lot due to memory bounds being exceeded.