hey all, well heres my first post of hopefully many more...
i'm completely new to linux (and was told here is where i should go) i am trying to get slackware installed and runing (as i was told its good to learn on as you HAVE to learn)
i have got as far as installing everything and seting up a dual boot from floppy, which is fine however i have got to the darkstar prompt, i log in and its fine but when i put
startx
it gives me a message like "no useable screens xserver failure e.t.c."
ok, so i have tryed xf86config and set all the millions of setings needed and still i get the same message.. what am i doing wrong?! i'm realy looking forward to learning what im suposed to be doing!
any help would be very.. uh.. helpfull

first of all slack is a great place to learn linux..... as long as you already have a very good knowledge of how computers work. and i mean inside and out. as for a linux newbie most people suggest using MDK or RH for a first time until you get the hang of it. but i don't know your level of knowledge so i am not going to say anything.
as var as helping you some things that you may need to provide are spacifics on your vid card and monitor and show us your xf86config file. maybe we might see a simple error that you are missing.

well i just noticed something pritty major (duh!) my gfx card is not listed, its a matrox millenium 550, i tryed the generic vga and svga drivers, so now i know whats wrong (i think) i will go a hunting for the drivers i need (if they exist) how would i open the config file? and how would i save it to my fat32 partition?... i think this may take sometime...
whats a "safe" set of options to try? ones that would work in most cases?

edit: found the driver its suposed to use, its geting a picture at last but my monitor refresh rates are wrong, how do i find out what they are? i'm going to do some more looking arround and see if i can find more info on my monitor, the thing is it just comes up as plug and play in win2k and thats all the info i get realy... :/

you could google for the serial number. i know that works for most hardware. matter of fact that is how i got info on my hardware. as far as resetting the settings you can manually go into your xf86conf file and change things there.

Gidday mate,

and congratulations for choosing Slack, best
Distro out there :}

Slack doesn't do any hardware detection, and
the default /etc/X11/XF86Config it installs works
for a few people, but not for all...

To setup your X you can try to run
XFree86 -configure first ... it might be able to autodetect
your card/monitor combo... (Read the output!!!) :)

If it doesn't you'll have to go the slightly more
tedious <BEG> way of xf86config, a text-based
question & answer game.

HIH.

Cheers,
Tink

I started with Slackware 2.0 quite a few years ago without too much previous computer knowledge. I think slackware was a big help in learning the internals of a computer just from looking around through everything (/proc, source, etc.) I like the way zero_new_uk put it, "you HAVE to learn".

I always suggest to my friends that wish to use linux for educational purposes to use Slackware (it gets down in the dirt, though not as much as it used to, which is understandable.) Otherwise, for someone just to say they run linux or someone that wants to try it out for a month and get rid of it, Redhat or Mandrake would be good just to duck with.

Also, he/she's plainly saying "I'm completely new to linux", why break their heart by telling them they can manually edit XF86Config? There's other things to learn first, like learning how to use xf86config ;) (what ever happened to XF86Setup? =)


Just my 2/100's ;)

I dunno, slackware 8.0 was my first distro after mandrake 8.0 and i don't really know that much about computers. I guess i was expecting slackware to be super hard like everyone makes it out to be, but really it wasn't that bad. I've found that editing .conf files isn't hard. Plus, that way if X breaks I'll know what to do to fix it.

Regarding your problem, try the command xfree86setup, that's what finally got X configured for me

Slackware has gotten easier to use, but linux in general really isn't THAT hard if you have the determination to learn it.