arg im having a whole amish ass drawn cart full of truble with slack....... i cant ever get xf86 to work it always gives me sum monster error when i input startx and i know my moniter setings are rite and my mouse works keyboard dose (evern if myn isnt in the list its what i get from buying a nice compusa brand one, plus i cant see the first 4 keyboards) how would i copy the error text to a floppy of copy anything for that matter. its taken me 2 weeks and still cant get it to boot w/o a floppy(yes its on a bootable part) and cant get it to load a gui im about to drop it cuz it cant work pllzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz help me i reaallllly dont wanna use rrh or drake(or windoze for that matter(mom is about to make me go buy win if i cant get this to work wants me to stop using her comp she keeps sayin ill crash it...cant see why though i only killed xp evry week or two))

try xfree86setup for your X configuration

after getting it going with that, if you don't like the screen size set the modes you want to use in the default screen subsection of the XF86Config file

if you have your mouse working in the console you can select text and then paste it into a file editor with the middle button.

I use vi for editing files

you can mount a floppy and put the file there.

some handy commands for helping to set up x:

xfree86setup (as already mentioned, usally works good)
XFree86 -configure
xf86cfg
xf86config

to copy the command is "cp" and most stuff is logged, for instance if your having problems with starting x, there should be a XFree86.0.log or somthing similar in /var/log/ you could copy these files to a floppy or a fat or fat32 windows partition ( i'm probably wrong in assuming you have gotten around to learning the 'mount' command yet). If you copy the logs and paste them here it might help.

I have been toying with various linuxes and settled on slackware, then v10 came out so I just killed my old installation and installed slackware from scratch. The new XWindows installation is in all sorts of new places. Hope it wasn't something I clicked accidentally in the install.

Under this new installation you have to use the xorg* stuff, not xf86 or XFree86
xorgsetup
xorgconfig
xorgcfg
found in /usr/X11R6/bin

xorgcfg should be run under your xwindows manager, I like xfce as gnome gave me some lip about running xorgcfg. If you run xorgcfg from outside of your xwin manager then it will try to update the wrong config files. You can pick your xwindows manager using xwmconfig. Fixing your xorg config under one xwindows manager should fix it for all xwindows managers. I have found that xorgcfg doesn't properly insert CR/LF into the config file so you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually, find the section for whatever you configured (in my case - my serial mouse) and do some clean up editing - just press enter in the right places - should be reasonably obvious.

Another tip that helps me heaps is to build the locate database
locate -u
then use locate to find files for you, eg:
locate xorgcfg
or use regular expressions
location -r x[^//]*config | more

Hope this helps someone.