Hi, I'm a newbie.

But being a newbie is something I plan on changing. With your help, if possible.

Last night I installed Slackware 12.0 onto my laptop (Asus A6V) and finally ended up in X (with the standard settings).
Well, today I started off with the darned xorgconfig, and dug my way through that... until I reached the horizontal and vertical sync-thingies. I read on the forums here that it didn't matter much, so I just wrote what was suggested (Horizontal: 31.5 - 90.0, vertical: 60.0 - 60.0).
But choosing a graphic-card isn't as simple it seems, as my card specifically isn't listed. (ATI Mobility Radeon X700)
I've tried choosing both ATI (general) and ATI Radeon (general), but to no avail. When starting X, the monitor turns black and seems dead, and the computer won't respond to any commands (Ctrl+Alt+Del, Ctrl+Alt+F1-7)

[Edit]
Trying to start xorgsetup just results in an error:
Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting
/usr/bin/xorgsetup: line 170: 3966 Aborted /usr/X11R6/bin/X -configure


So, any experienced people who're willing to devote a few seconds to help me?

Being a former newbie myself, I would recommend another distro. I love slack, have used it for a long time, but it is not newbie friendly. I now use OpenSUSE, mainly because we have Novell servers here at work, and SUSE and Novell play nice together. Ubuntu or Kubuntu would be my choices for the new Linux user, both have superb hardware detection and are much easier for non-geeks to operate.

I know it's not newbie friendly, that's why I chose it. :P
When you first learn it the hard way, you've learned it. That's what I think atleast. And it would take a couple of days to download a new iso.

I'll second the recommendation of *ubuntu. If you are coming from Windows, Kubuntu might seem a little more familiar since it uses KDE. Any *ubuntu flavor should recognize the same hardware since the main differences lie in the desktop environment, not the driver stuff.

There are several distros that are newbie friendly, and some might recognize stuff that others don't. If you don't have success with ubuntu, you might try mepis or pclinuxos. I found that pclinuxos immediately recognized my ATI Radeon when some other distros didn't. I don't remember what model of ATI it is, and I'm at work now and can't check.

I would recommend starting with the generic vesa driver, and getting the monitor selection and settings correct first before tackling installing an ATI driver. Divide & conquer.

You could be sneeky and cheat a bit to. There's no reason you couldn't install two distro's. A more newbie friendly distro like SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva or Ubuntu might pick the correct driver for you. You could use the easier distro as a model to fix slackware. Or you might choose to go with one of the distro's I mentioned instead.

There was a post last week from a disabled 60 year old newbie (suffering with dementia). A poster suggested he install slackware! I couldn't believe it. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=569382

When I was new to Linux, the distro I was using didn't install on my new desktop (Back in the Windows ME days). It didn't like my usb keyboard among other things. I just tried a different distro that did install. ( Earlier, I never did get OS/2 Warp installed after spending $99 in long distance charges with customer service.) I would alternate between trying SuSE and Mandrake. One of them would work.

Sounds like you intend to do a lot of tinkering to learn Linux. That's part of what it is all about. however you will get discouraged real fast if you spend an hour figuring things out for every 5 minutes that goes well. Believe me, that can go on for months.

My recommendation is to get two distros. One for using and one for experimenting. You can learn more stuff on a working system than you can on one problem that hounds you for days.

Make enough partitions to host two or three systems. Put a good friendly distro on one and use it as the default boot OS. Then get Gentoo or LFS/BLFS and start hacking. By the time you create a fully functional system with one of those, you will be a guru. They say that if you want to learn (any distro), install (that distro). If you want to learn Linux, install Gentoo.

If you decide to use Gentoo as your experimental OS, you might also consider Sabayon as your main OS, since it is based on Gentoo and the package management is the same.

Two Linuxes then, eh? Then I'd have to download another distro, which'll take atleast a couple of days. But, nothing is learned in one day, eh?

I assume you don't have a broadband connection. Yes, it can take a long time to download a full distro. The ones that you can boot as a live cd and then install are usually close to 700 MB. The Gentoo minimal distro is only about 130MB because it only contains enough to get you started. From that you collect a piece at a time as you build the different parts of your installation. Your downloading is thus distributed over time. I doubt that you would have to download anywhere near the 700 MB since you will only get what you intend to use. The full-blown distros will have tons of stuff you will never use.

As far as your main distro goes, I see 3 options for you.
1. Bite the bullet and start the download. Start it before you go to bed or to work.
2. Order a CD. They are cheap through DistroWatch, free from Ubuntu. I don't believe that Ubuntu even charges for postage.
3. Find a friend with a broadband connection and offer to buy him a beer in exchange for using his computer to download your iso.