XF86Config

[circuitjump]

OK, I wanted to ask if anyone can explain the steps for configuring X for RedHat Linux 7.3? I've been trying and I don't know if I'm supposed to restart the X server or what, I don't even know the command to restarting it if there is one, but I'm getting really annoyed at the fact that I can't get the darn thing to work. Would anyone be so kind as to send me some links via sticky mail or e-mail for learning Linux in general? I have decided to dive into Linux all the way. That means I boot MS Windows out the "Window".

Thanks for any help. And yes, I'm running over the XF86 site right now. But it's darn complicated to find what I need. ;)

[bird]

I just fought with that this week, and ended up compiling X myself, in order to get rid of a stupid bug in 4.2 that wasn't fixed yet in the Suse rpms.

I'm afraid your question is a little too general. Do you have any specific problems? The manual pages explain most of what you need to know, assuming you understand their lingo. Suse has the sax2 configurator program, which offers to do all the settings in a GUI. There's also the XF96Setup program doing similar things, and I think that one comes with X.

And yes, after you have made changes to your config you need to restart the server. It can't reread the file once its running, as most of the options affect the drivers it needs to load. The simplest way to start and stop the X server usually is to switch to a different runlevel ("init #"), but I have no idea which ones that would be on a Redhat system (3 and 5 on Suse).

[heini]

Hmm usually you do the X configuration as part of the installation routine.
Installing Redhat 7.2 this part didn't work for me - the graphic card is pretty old.
So I started from the command prompt Xconfigurator - it's a basic graphic configuration tool, which lets you choose from different options and test what works for your setup.

Learning Linux: I'm absolutely new to Linux. Instead of buying the complete CD collection I invested in the O'Reilly book Learning Redhat Linux, which comes with a 2 CD version of Redhat 7.2.
The book works good for me. Additionally searching for answers to specific problems forums and mail lists proved being very helpful.

[David]

The gui for Redhat X configuration:

In a terminal as root type... Xconfigurator
That brings up a gui to walk you through setting up your hardware (you move around with the tab key and use the space bar to mark an entry). After your done it will restart X.
If you have something more specific with X your working on let us know.

Your config file is located
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4

[circuitjump]

Thank you all!
I got it working! I used Xconfigurator and it finally worked. I guess it's like david said, Xconfigurator restarts the server for you. I tried using xf86cfg and it would make changes but never actually overwrite the files XF86Config. I also tried xf86config and this would write to xf86config-4 but that was all it did. I never restarted the X server so that is most likely part of my problem. I managed to find a tutorial on Xconfigurator on the RedHat site and that ended up getting me through it.

Thank you all for the help and also to those of you who send me sticky mail! :)