Re: RH 6.2 install causes screen to explode

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

This all started with your screen turning blue, right?  I fixed that
(Gateway 3350, ATI Rage Mobility LM chipset IIRC) by upgrading to
XFree86 4.0.  See if you have any XFree86-4.0*.i386.rpm's.

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Evans <peter@example.com> writes:

    Peter> Every book I have here assumes that I install X while
    Peter> installing Linux.  If you could either tell me where I
    Peter> could start or point me to a how-to-install-X web page, I'd
    Peter> be grateful.

This is Catch-22, Red Hat style.

Like MS-Windows, the X Window System is a large collections of
cooperating libraries, programs, and daemons.  Some are tightly bound
together, others can be added and removed on a whim.  Unlike
MS-Windows, the components are separately packaged.  The packaging
breakdown is chosen for the convenience of the installer program more
than the hurting user.

Some theory:

The center of the system is the X server.  Unlike MS-Windows, which
mixes the OS and the GUI, X11 is provided by a separate server which
contrls the display.  In the most recent version of XFree86, there is
only one server program, XFree86, which detects (for typical
configurations) the capabilities and hardware on your system, and
loads dynamic libraries to handle them.  Unfortunately, RH 6.x has the
older version, with multiple versions of the server program, basically
one per video chipset.

This means that installing X*.rpm may be a bad idea.  At best is
wastes space.

XF86Setup works by loading the VGA16 (640x480x16colors) server, which
almost all hardware supports.  This gives the user (except you :(,
since you apparently have broken-by-design hardware) a bare-bones GUI
with which to configure the more powerful chip-specific server.  There
is a program called SuperProbe, probably packaged with XF86Setup, that
automatically detects your hardware.  Usually.  This is what the setup
programs use to find out how to do configure your X server.

Practice:

So at a minimum, you need to install the XF86Setup, Tcl, and Tk
packages, and possibly the vga16 server.  Maybe SuperSprobe is a
separate package, too.  Run SuperProbe, which will ask you if you
really want to do this and tell you scary things about exploding
monitors.  Do it anyway and tell us what it says.

BTW: The fact that the Xconfigurator asks for GTK is an excellent
reason to stay waaaaaaay away from it.  There is no excuse whatsoever
for that, except that the author cares more about glitz than function.
(There are many situations where glitz is an important part of
functionality.  Bootstrapping the X server is not one of them.)

-- 
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