Color Mode Startup Difficulties
 

Is there some way of changing what the color mode before X starts, or failing that, can I simply alter some config file and restart?

You see, I just switched over to another monitor for a little while(I'm off from school for a week and didn't want to port my big 19-inch home), but it doesn't support 24-bit color, which happens to be what I set it at before I left. The problem I'm having is that the monitor neatly displays "Frequency Out of Range" and nothing else after X starts. I'm sure there's a simple way of solving this, but I'm really new to Linux and my knowledge of its workings is spotty, at best.

Thanks a bunch.
Nick

You need to reconfigure X. Depending on your distribution, that you didn't put in your sig, it may require one of these commands -
xf86config
xconfigurator
XFdrake

One of them may then start a little app that lets you choose values for such things as colour depth and refresh rate and horiz and vert frequencies. Make sure you know what the ranges are for your monitor (perhaps a google search would help if you don't have the manual).

This is probably a really boneheaded question, but how do you change the startup runlevel from the GRUB boot manager?

Since X starts automatically, it automatically makes my system unusable, so if I can reduce the run level before X stats, it won't start, allowing me to run the necessary config program.

It's a dumb question, because I should know, but what can I say, I'm a :newbie:.

The keystrokes ctrl-alt-backspace kill the x-server anyway, so don't worry about it.

For some reason that didn't work, but I used a rescue disk and altered the run level... now to get the mouse to work properly (a problem I was dealing with /before/ all this started).

no, that's only if you started X with startx, if X is started automaticly, it'll just restart and go back to kdm,gmd,...
[edit]: btw, if you want to change runlevels, open up a terminal and enter
su (to become root)
init x (where x is the runlevel you want to go to. For RedHat,and compatible distro's, init 3 is the one you want: all services are started but X)
[/edit]

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Cheers.