I've got an old Dell XPS R350, with a STB nVidia ZX 8MB video card. I lost the windows disc, and the one my friend lent me wasn't working, (Possibly Dell propriatary disk?) and I didn't want to shell out another 90 bucks for a disk, so I tried Linux. I chose Debian as my first install. Everything was way over my head, but I'm slowly learning. I chose default or recommended on everything, which was alot. I must have installed everything I thought would be slightly useful! I made it to the cusor though. (Side question: is it prompt, or what is it in Linux?) I've learned rudimentary command skills, and have gotten to correcting mistakes. My first job is getting X working, though I hope not to use it that much. I'm having trouble, though. I found a site with a How-to, but it wasn't debian, and I can't find any of the directories. I ran xf86config, but it doesn't have a file for my videocard. I used the STB nVidia 128, since my card uses the RIVA128 chip as well. However, when I try to start X, it says "No screen found." I entered the screen statistics asked by XF86Config specificly for my monitor. Help for a newbie?

If you installed Debian 3.0, you probably got one of the XFree86 4.x.x series, try the command:

/usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -configure

and then follow the directions it give you as to what to do next (you'll have to ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X if the test succeeds). If it does succeed, copy the file it made to /etc/X11/ and you should be alright.

Cheers,

Finegan

I don't think I did. Should I install 3.0?

Or apt-get your way up to a newer X-server. Or really if you're learning Linux from the ground up, you may wish to try one of the more user-friendly distros.

Cheers,

Finegan