I am having a small problem. I have an a7v with a 900 t-bird. Riva tnt2 Ga-622 32mb by gigabyte. With some help from http://www.geocities.com/ender7007/
I have been able to get to the $ prompt and seem to have plenty of functionality, unfourtanity the Unix book I have is very general but most of the commands work so i assume i am somewhat golden. But when i try to startx.

1. my screen goes blank
2. My monitor stops receiving data
3. System apears frozen

To resolve this I Hit CTRL+Alt+Backspace
Then i can see the messages.
If I:

1. Let the screen be black for a while(maybe 3mins) i see:

a. Gnome UI warning **: could not open help topic file null.
b. GDK-ERROR **: 0.0 BROKEN(explicit kill or server shutdown).
c. waiting for x server to shutown.
d. Gdk warning **: GDK window 0x300041 unexpectedly destroyed. this line is repeated with the numbers decending (i.e. 40, 3f, 35, 34, 33, 30) sometimes followed by error 1b (see above)

2. press ctrl+alt+back quickly i see

a. Apparent typical loading stuff
i. recognizing video card
ii. checking leagal pool of screensizes (i assinged during custom install)

b. First thing that looks like an error
i. "Speed up code selection modified because virtual x != 1024"

c FIrst definate error right affter SESSION MANAGER
i. GDK-ERROR **: 0.0 BROKEN(explicit kill or server shutdown.

Did i mess something up when selecting packages? I have done select all and just defaults(gnome wkstation included.

I cannot choose gnome workstation Install because that installation does not provide me with a boot disk which i need? and a boot disk from a different install causes a kernal panic.

If you have experienced anything like this Could you help me out? One more thing, will i get through a clean install with 7.1?

Thanks in advance

It looks as though your video card/monitor may not have been configured correctly. Try re-running your X configuration program (Xconfigurator, XF86Setup, whatever your distro provides) and check/set your display specs there.

could you post the last couple of lines that are output by X? they would be in the X log file... i can't remember it's name right off the top of my head, but it's in the /var/log/ directory.

also, how did you install linux? from a cd, downloaded it? what distro are you trying to install?

thanks for your help everything worked out fine. I just had to do a little more research on my monitors specs. now that i am in. I can use the online documentation to solve anyother problems. Stinks trying to install fist time with no instructions but it got done with help from good peple. Thanks again