I'm having problems when I type 'startx'. It seems that my monitor (MAG 770fs) isn't recongnized well. In the installation process, RH 9 detected my video card as radeon 9100, which is right. Then when the display part came in, it just chose something like unknown hardware or something. So I just went to the maginnovision site to get the horizontal and vertical hz of the mag 770fs monitor. I got h 30-70 v 50-160 so that's what I typed in. Still no progress.

Do I still need drivers for the monitor? if so, how can I install it? What are the commands? I'm a newbie who hasn't gone past the startx part btw.

Distro is Red Hat 9.

Sounds similar to a problem I ran into. I've got totally different hardware (panasonic S17 and Intel 845) but got error msg that there was not monitor when i tried to run startx. when i went thru the xf86config program it asked me to assign a name for my monitor and video card, first few times I ran the config I left these blank (no error message) but got the message there was no monitor when I ran startx. I ran it again and put in names for my mon an vid (pana and intel respectively) and everything worked great.

Any problems starting X I would recomment using basic VGA drivers instead of the hardware specific ones until you get into X then change to your specific hardware.

Hope this helps. or I could be on the totally wrong page with this :-)

If you want to do some hacking on the Monitors database provided with Red Hat Linux do the following :

"su -"
"cd /usr/share/hwdata"
"cp -p MonitorsDB MonitorsDB.backup"
"vi MonitorsDB"

(
go to the 'MAG Technology' section in this file and add the following line :
MAG Technology Co., Ltd.; MAG 770FS; 0; 30.0-70.0; 50.0-160.0; 1
)

<save your changes>

compare "MonitorsDB.backup" with "MonitorsDB" to make sure everything is edited as you intended to do ("diff MonitorsDB.backup MonitorsDB").

(I looked at the URL "http://www.maginnovision.com/Products/770FS.asp" to get this information).

Try to go to a non-graphical runlevel :
"su -"
"init 3"
"redhat-config-xfree86 -v --reconfig"

Select your newly added monitor from the list.

"init 5"

If you've got success with this trick, please report this missing monitor at the Bugzilla database at the Red Hat site : "bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla".
File your bug against the component "hwdata" and with a bit of luck you'll see support for this monitor in the next Red Hat release.

If you haven't got success with this trick, well.... maybe somebody else has some suggestions ... :-)

Good luck!