Hi im a newbie to this and find this forum really helpful...

Recently I've tried to make my Fedore Core 4 look like a Mac OS by reading a tutorial online. It told me to edit the xorg.conf file, so i did and restarted and now it will not boot into a GUI/KDE (GNU?)..just a DOS/Terminal lookalike screen where I can still login etc and seem to have the commands there. I dont really want to reinstall fedora again as I've done alot to it (i.e drivers etc)

I just want to know how I can make the xorg.conf file how it was.. I do remember the scripts I put in so can always re-edit it (if i know the commands and someway of deleting them and resaving the xorg.conf)

Cheers

A lesson for the future... always backup your xorg.conf file before you make any changes to it.

Your computer is still fully functional, it's just missing the graphical X server.

Login as root, then type
"pico /etc/X11/xorg.conf" to open xorg.conf in a simple editing program.
Now comes the hard part... figure out what you changed before and change it back to the way it was, then save the file and quit pico.

Once you've done that, type startx to see boot up the X server again.
If this works, then next time you reboot it should go directly into X again.

As I recall, Fedora boots to GUI by default, so you have to get yourself into text mode. Since you asked how to edit "on boot" :

When you get to the Grub screen, select Fedora and press "e" that will allow you to edit a line in your Fedora Entry.
select the line with "kernel" in it and press "e" again. add "3" to the end of that line.
Press enter, then "b" to boot that configuration.

That should boot you directly to text mode where you can (as root) edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf back to a workable state.

*edit changed the word "will" into "should"

If you have a command line, you should be able to do this.

1) Login
2) change directories cd /etc/X11
3) list the contents ls
4) change to root su, enter the root password
5) you should see "xorg.conf" listed, maybe there's a backup file "xorg.conf.bak" or something like that
6) If there is a backup, first cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.bak2 then cp xorg.conf.bak xorg.conf
6b) If there is no backup, edit the file nano xorg.conf and put a "#" in front of each line you want to comment out
7) Save the file Ctrl-X say yes to save the file
8) Restart the xserver Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

If this computer is on a network with other computers, it may be easier to just let it boot then ssh into from another box and then edit the file. Either way, you need to get to the command line and edit the file.

Depending on the editor that was used, the old xorg.conf could have been automatically backed up already, with the name xorg.conf~. Look for that first, and if it is there just use it.

Thanks everyone, back in linux now and sorted :-)