Hello. Thank you in advance for any help. I am pretty new to Linux. I know how to work on it and solve the usual basic stuff, but not what I would call competent, yet. I have 2 issues that may or may not be related...

I am running FC3 on a 900Mhz, 256Ram and a Nvidia TNT Riva video card. Ever since I installed the FC I have had issues with the screen locking up. Complete freeze. Accepting no input from either the mouse or keyboard. This would happen, every day or so and random times - generally when I was opening an office file or Firefox, but sometimes just moving the curser across the screen albeit rarely.

I also have a thinkpad laptop running RH8(It's an old laptop ). So the last time the screen froze on the 900Meg system I used the laptop to ssh into it and I was able to work just fine that way, but no access from the actual computer.

I have the a complete up to date system, including the nvidia drivers for the kernal, and it doesn't seem to matter which kernal I use, the screen would freeze regardless. I have/had no idea what would cause it...

2nd issue, which I think is tied to the first.. I had a chkrootkit and I thought to myself why not install it and see if it finds anything, maybe that it the source of the problem, not thinking it was, but desperete times. So I installed it, and ran it and it came away that my system was clean. I shut it down.

When I brought it back up in the morning it couldn't start my x server. A blue screen lead me to a blank screen where I was prompted to put my root/privledged(their words not mine) and then brought to the display config. I set it up, save it and the system starts. If I set the display to my usual 1025x748 the system will still freeze. If however I set it to 800x600, the system seems to be OK(Been using it for a couple of days like this and no problems - touch wood). However. if I shut down the system, when I restart it, the xserver fails again. It will not just boot up, it doesn't seem to save the settings despite it tells me it does.

So, how can I make sure that my x server settings, are truly saved so I don't have to always go through it?

As an extra thing though, since using that chkrootkit I also have lost my floppy drive somewhere. Couldn't manually mount it either. It simply isn't in the system now.

I don't really understand this. ANy help would be very very very appreciated.

Thanks.

Sounds more like a problem with your video card rather than a security issue. Is there any other reason to make you think it was a security compromise? Being prompted for the root password is pretty normal to run system config utils.

To be honest if your system is really that screwed up, you may just want to re-install. If you want to try and recover, try running system-config-display (I believe this use to be redhat-config-display) and try and reset the settings for your videocard ( safest bet is to start with the lower resolutions first). IIRC, the TNT Riva is a relatively low-power graphics card, so you may not be able to get higher resolutions out of it. Make sure to check out your xorg logs in /var/log for any error messages as well.

Thanks Capt_Caveman,(Awesome ID BTW, loved that charactor)

The reason why I suspect I might have been exploited is, I am exceptionally paranoid, I have lost my floppy drive(unable to even manually mount it, but it was there and working prior to my attempt to fix things with the chkrootkit, and....did I mention I was paranoid?

I am pretty new in terms of actually understanding the different symptoms and solutions with the machine, so I have to accept that I really don't know, and I guess my first thought was it was a security problem. I did have the 1025x748 when I had windows on this machine, but even at 800x600 I can more than live with it. Seems to be exceptionally stable at the moment.

Thank you for your help, and I hope you will be able to help with the seemingly endless questions I have.

Cheers.