I made a big mistake?
 

I thought X was shutdown and I did " tar -xvzf XFree86-3.3-libs.tar.gz " now i cannot start X and i get all kinds of errors when i do startx. Is there an easy way to fix this? :(

If you only untarred it, I don't see how it messed up X. Now if you started compiling, that's another story. But having close to 1k posts, you should realize now that without any actual error messages, we are not going to be much help.
Have you tried just simply reconfiguring X? And again, untarring a tar.gz package shouldn't do any harm to anything. So you must have done something else, etc.

I'm going to respond even though I may be wrong.
If you were in the directory with the *.tar.gz file that should only have uncompressed the source code into it's own folder. Probably XFree86-3.3-libs/ .
If you were not in the correct directory that command whould probably return a file not found error.
How did you shut X down to begin with?

I untarred it into /usr/X11R6/lib and i think it overwrote files of version 4 with version 3.3 and there was a link to 3.3 version and i didnt know i had version 4. why do they have a link to such an old version? I didnt do anything else. On the XMMS website it said shut down X before doing this so somehow I thought that hitting ctrl-alt-F1 shut downs X but i guess it dosnt. I cannot post any errors cuz I cannot boot into X or any gui or start any program that uses a gui. I am posting this from my XP system. Looks like i might be reinstalling linux again for the 1,2,3,4, 5th time :eek:

No need to reinstall linux, just reinstall XFree.

How do i reinstall just XFree86?

Just a FYI, yeah, ctrl-alt-F1 thru F6 changes consoles, doesn't kill X. ctrl - alt - backspace kills X, but if you start in X automatically in runlevel 5, well its just gonna start again, you will or would have to start in runlevel 3.

Regards.

PS. When I said give us error messages, I mean when X is trying to startup, give us the error messages, maybe you can try booting to runlevel 3 and attempt to startx manually to see what errors it gives.

And reinstalling XFree, why not just try reinstalling the libs that your current version uses?? :confused:

Install via rpm, source, emerge, apt-get...dont know what distro you have.

Oh, thanks for the info on killing X. I dont know what libs my version (Mandrake 9.2) uses and i wouldnt know how to install them anyway, I just tried to install XFree from the Mandrake CD but it just spewed across the screen confilct with version i was trying to install.
When i try startx I get a Relocation error and it says couldnt load XKB keymap.