hello,

i had mandrake 10 running well up until now. i set the video display from 16 to 15bits and i was told to restart. now when i startup all i get is a console, no gui. i tried "startx" but i get an error that says my display adapter doesn't support 15bit. how do i change it back to 16bit without a gui?

thanks in advance...

As root you will have to edit you XF86Config file which will be something like

/etc/X11/XF86Config
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4

or whatever... Towards the bottom in the screens section look for something like

DefaultColorDepth 15

and change it... See how that goes.

i am a real noob, how do i view the file? and change it?

Dang... I suppose you'll need a crash course in vi. It's the only editor you are like to have

Okay, you will need to be root. That means using

su

and then typing in your admin or root password.

Then you will need something like

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

or it may be /etc/X11/XF86Config, or other... Depends on the system but maybe we'll get lucky here

once you have the XF86Config file opened, you can use the cursor keys to scroll down and find the line you need... vi is in move around mode at the moment (it's a little odd to get used to) Look for something like:

DefaultColorDepth 15

Get the cursor near the 15 and then hit the insert key. vi will now be in edit mode and you can use the keys and delete or whatever to edit the number back to 16

when finished, hit ESC (escape) to go out of edit mode.

then you can write the file back to the disk by typing

:w

you can then quit vi with by typing

:q

If you screw up[ at any time, just hit ESC a couple of times and type

:q!

to get out without saving and then you can start again at the top

Hope to heck this helps you

thank you very much for your help,

i logged in as root and used this command:
sed -i~ 's/DefaultColorDepth.*$/DefaultColorDepth 16/' /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

and it worked

thanks again, i will mess around with what you instructed me to do to try it out

thanks again

Well, that's the quick way I thought I'd stick with vi to keep it 'simple'

It does pay to learn vi for these times in case you have to do a lot of edit work without X running...

Mind you I tend to always install jed

glad you got it going...

Jed's awesome. Nano is included with Mandrake by default. Its also quite easy to use (what came with my Gentoo base system, and I've been too lazy to bother installing jed. LOL)