I had redhat 7.2 installed on my p3 600mhz, 128mb sdram, linksys network card, with a voodoo rush card.

I had problems getting X windows to work, it would always give me out of sync errors dispite me making sure the settings were correct..

i just wiped that and installed RH9.. same problem. I did the text install, because if I tried the regular one it would just give me the out of sync thing.

So i've got two questions:

1) How do I boot into RH9 without loading X Windows.. if I can get to a command line, then I guess i can try to configure it further that way

2) How should i configure it? It reads my card as a3d with 4mb of ram.. not sure if those are the exact stats, this is a card of out an old computer a friend gave me. Also, it chooses the correct monitor with the correct settings (princeton EO15, 15incher).. Does anyone have a voodoo rush that can help me out?

Thanks in advance,

Pete

To boot without X you need to append " 3" to your kernel arguments at boot or after boot:
1) Ctrl + Alt + F1
2) Login as root
3) "init 3"

To configure x once logged in run:
redhat-config-xfree86

Then enter your hardware details. You can test the settings by running:
Xtest

This should display a test screen with a message asing you if it worked correctly. If you can't see anything then jsut wait 15 seconds and it will disappear.

thanks so much, do i do the crtl alt f1 thing while it's loading?

No once it has loaded. This boots with X loaded but pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1 will take you to a console. "init 3" will drop you into runlevel 3 (same as apending " 3") to your kernel arguments. By default X will only be run in runlevel 5 so you are fairly safe to assume that it won't run in 3.

Generally computers acting as servers will have a default runlevel of 3 (no GUI - possibly not even installed) and Desktop PCs will have a default runlevel of 5 (With a GUI).

These are only the defaults but most people stick to these as standard.

strange, hitting crtl + alt +f1 clears the out of sync thing, but it just gives me a blank screen..

It should give you a CLI (command line interface) login prompt. If not then try adding " 3" to your kernel arguments.