Resetting Video card, typed xwin, screen went black
 

I was trying Puppy Linux and playing with the video card settings. I followed some directions, couldn't exit the settings box, followed more directions, typed xwin -- and my monitor went black - and stayed black. I tried typing more keys, pressing buttons, pressing the enter key. I took the disk out, rebooted without the disk, (it says it's missing a NLDIR file, or something like that during the boot process), so I put the disk back in and Linux Puppy started just fine, but when it got to the desktop, the screen went black again.

I even tried installing an Ubuntu disk to do a clean install, and the installation barely started, but when it got to a certain point (I guess where it reads the video card?) the monitor went black again during the Ubuntu installation.

It was easy to get the screen black, it just took typing four little letters; surely it must be simple to fix?

I re-installed an old WinXP disk and everything is fine. I'm running Puppy off the disk again, and this time I won't touch any video card settings. :/

it might be because your using the wrong command. it should be 'startx'