Hello, ok first i am a gentoo user but in an effort to get friends and family to try linux i ma going to be using mepis on their machines as it looks a nice user friendly distro.

First off is going to be my father, but he is only on dialup and won't let me take his laptop as is addicted to ebay and wants very little down time.

I am going to be installing a new hard drive as his is an old drive, what i have done is install mepis on this new hard drive on my own laptop which is an AMD 2500, while his is an old dell P3 866.

Once i had got a basic install with updates done on my laptop i took it over to him and installed it in his dell, it booted fine and seemed to find and load kernel modules for the dell, sound card etc, but X would not start.

Which was not a suprise, thing is not being Deb user i could not find how to automatically re-configure Xorg but now believe i can use:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Is this true?

Also what else might i have to reconfigure?

The other options is to do an full install on my laptop with his hard drive then burn the contents of apt cache dir to cd, then do fresh install and copy the cd into apt cache dir!

Would this work?

many thanks

Mepis only takes 40 minutes to install. You can do it while he is eating dinner.

man XFree86 if you using X should tell you how to configure a XFree86 file.

XFree86 -configure

this should come up with an XFree86.new file.

Test this file with the following,

Xfree86 -XFree86config XFree86.new

If the file works, then copy it into the /etc/X11 folder.

Have fun!