[ilug-cal] Linux behaving strangely on 2nd day...

[Amit Kumar Sharma]

Hello,         I am a very new Linux user. I have a SiS PCI VGA card (6215C) which probably Linux doesn't like, or maybe the card vendors (SiS) don't like Linux. The display has been very lo-resolution, painstakingly big characters and a big desktop which does not scroll with the mouse.         OK, so over yesterday I was able to log in the console, boot in 3 mode from LILO and have been able to run XF86Config (I don't have XF86Setup : using RH6.0) and tweak with the settings, but the settings did not yield a result. Today when I started, after the Logon prompt came up, instead of starting X, the system is telling me: According to /var/run/gdm.pid gdm was already running, but seems to have been murdered mysteriously. and is not loading X - the message appeared 40-50 times and is reappearing many a times with no visible reason when I'm leaving the machine idle for a moment. Yesterday many sources told me to use Generic VGA as my setting, and when I ran XF86Config, it gave me a generic option and an unsupported VGA option (which I had been thinking to be generic and using) - so I chose generic. And after configuration, when I started X, it won't start, but dumped a whole lot of info(?) containing names of sooo many VGA cards in a list (and yes, my card was not even in this list!) and then writing lines containing a resolution (eg "800x600") then something,, then saying something like "needs 110.56 Hz rate : deleted" numbers are arbitrary...   and this way X is not starting ... what happened to my system overnight? ghost attack?? or a murderer crept into my machine and murdered this person called GirDhariMal (gdm)? :-)) I also tried typing gdm on the prompt, but it gives me: 'gdm: already running'   Do I need to reinstall?   Amit Kumar Sharma http://swastik.virtualave.net/