I just installed RH9, and now as it boots up, once it gets to the Gnome desktop, the video wigs out, looks like I may have chosen the wrong video card in the setup, or the display can't handle the resolution. How can I boot to command line and check my video card choice and resolution settings?

Ok, I seem to have figured out a fix: I had a spare video card that I swapped, so that during the boot, it saw new hardware. I still am curious as to how I could have done it had I not had a spare vid card laying arround. It turnes out I had the correct video card chosen, so it must have been the resolution that would have needed changed.

Ok. i have had this one happen many times while multiheading...
you would need some way to get into a console. one way, if x hasnt stalled is to hit ctrl+alt+f4. ctrl+alt+ a fkey will take you to different consoles. while i dont know why so many, i know that 7 is the one x runs in by defauly. but back to the subject. if x is too far gone, you will need to get a form of bootable linux that understands the ext3 file system. i suggest knoppix or business card linux. mount your linux partition and vi <mountpoint>/etc/X11/XF86Config. then comes the fun part... you have to manually edit the lines. find your monitor product number and put it in a search with horiz sync. find the HorizSync and the VertRefresh for your monitor and input them. save it and reboot or restart x. thats about it.

Great, thanks, x was working fine, I could see the mouse pointer moving around as a horizontal line(obviously out of sync) and I could type in root and root password, and see that it was doing something, so it was still operating ok, I just didn't know how to get to the console. Thanks again