I guess I should start by saying that I'm completely new to Linux. I have just installed Slackware 9.0 (about five or six times) and i'm trying to get KDE running. I ran the xf86config a bunch of times. It had my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro (with 8MB of RAM) listed so i used that. I set up the monitor the best I could, it's an Orchestra Trombone 2 made by KDS all I could find on the internet was the Trombone 1. When I run startx the screen goes blank and sometimes the power light on the monitor goes yellow/red I think the error message said "fatal server error: could not load default font 'fixed'". I thought the resolution it was trying was too high. So i tried it with 8bit color at 640x480. Now the screen goes blank but the monitor power light stays green and the error message is " fatal server error: no screens found. I tried looking in the config file for the xf86 but as far as i could tell it was fine. at this point i'm completely out of ideas and any help would be appreciated.

have you tried XFree86 -configure ???
Here is a simple script for you.

XFree86 -configure
cp ~/XF86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config
startx

That should do it.

i ran the XFree86 -configure and did the other stuff and now i get the error
fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'

there is also a part that says
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server after 0 requests (o known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I also checked the log file /var/log/XFree86.0.log and there was a big chunk of it where it listed different resolutions and said hsync out of range and some of them also say bad node clock/interlace/doublescan

again, thanks for any ideas anyone has about this

I also ran into the same behavior a little while ago, and in my case, it was being caused by a combination of color depth settings that were too high in addition to declaring that my VideoRAM was more than I actually had.

I'm working from memory here because I'm not at my Linux box, but in the XF86Config file, I think that the 2 settings to check would be that a) the default color depth is set to either 8 or 16, and b) that if you have an 8Mg card that the VideoRAM parameter in your video driver section is set to 8192.

I'm likewise a newcomer in the Linux world, so I would defer to the more expert posters here on the board, but at least for me, the scenario I described above did the trick. (In my case I'm using an ATI Radeon 7500, and what I ended up doing was to set it things to a color depth of 16, a VideoRAM value of 65536 and a resolution of 1152x864) Good luck with it -- J.W.

During the install, did you select Custom X fonts????

Chris

I used the full install and i selected both of the X related things. So I assume that would include custom X fonts. The only stuff I didn't select to install was emacs and GNOME and Games.

As far as the post by J.W. I tried changing the amount of ram and different color depths but it doesn't work. if i use 8 bit or higher color it says that it could not open the default font, if i use four bit color it says it cannot find a screen.

Well, it sounds to me like you didn't install the base fonts.. If you select Custom X Fonts then it will overide the base fonts. You might be better off popping the disc in and going at it once more.

Chris

alright so I'm reinstalling now and i should make sure that i get the base fonts and not the custom fonts?

ok i just reinstalled and i made sure the basic fonts were there. i set up the XFree86 using -configure and i'm getting the same error after i run startx. however the Xfree86.0.log isn't the same. instead of a long list of resolutions that are out of range. there is a long list of modes that have various attrbutes. it seemed to get farther but in the end it was the same fatal error. i'm going to try playing with the scan rates. i don't know what else to do.