I recently installed Red Hat 9 on my laptop and I've been having a hellish time trying to get X to work. Every time I try to start it up, I get this error:

Fatal server error:
no screens found

XIO: Fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ".0:0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

along with plenty of contact info.

My laptop, the HP Pavillion zx5051, sports an ATI Mobility 9600 (M10) and a 15.4" widescreen monitor with a native 1280x800 resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate. When first installing Red Hat, I couldn't find any monitor that vaguely resembled that, so I went with an unprobed monitor, and several unhappy days were spent messing with the XF86Config file (and learning a lot about Linux in the process, as I am quite the newbie, so it wasn't a total loss =P). After endlessly toying around with that, I gave up and re-installed everything, taking the care this time around to make sure that I chose the M9 (closest to my M10...) and a generic laptop monitor (1024x768).

Same error

Tomorrow I'm going to try installing Fedora with the help of a more Linux-experienced friend of mine, which should hopefully ensure a more-or-less smooth process. I could really use some advice however, in case that doesn't work (not to mention that I could learn a bit from it ), such as which distro is more laptop-friendly, how to configure a graphical environment so that it recognises my laptop's screen, how to ensure the screen parameters are within safe limits, how to ensure the resolution is right...

Thanks for your patience!