how to tell OS about the vga and monitor

[sricky]

Hi masters,

I am newbie trying to install and play with Redhat Linux 7.2. After installation, which I chose GNOME to be the default GUI, it doesn't show the window. It just prompted me for username and password in text based console. I wouldn't call that a console anyway since it is not a window. It just like a plain DOS-like text based screen.

It came to my mind that maybe the OS was not able to detect the correct VGA and monitor so it cannot show the GUI. What do you guys think about this? If my guess is correct, How can I set the vga and monitor for the OS to be able to utilize them?

Thanks.

Ric

[drummerboy195]

have you tried typing "startx"?

[serz]

Logging in as root and typing "xf86config", that will ask you some things in order to set up X.

[mrBen]

Out of curiousity, why 7.2? It's quite out-of-date by now, and you'd probably be better of (as a newbie) with something more recent.

Oh, and try startx first. If that works, then you can switch to a graphical login by changing the initdefault value in /etc/inittab to 5.

RedHat 7.2 also comes with quite a good X setup prog called Xconfigurator (not sure about the capitalisation, you may have to change the X, and/or the c to find the program) which is probably easier to use that xf86config

[sricky]

I have tried to configure from Xf86config but it asked a few things about monitor and graphic card that I can answer. Those about Hfreq, Vfreq and I don't even know how much memory in my graphic card since I bought this PC as a second hand.
Is there a tool that I could use to probe this hardware and tell me the result? It did tell me about this Superprobe thing but I cannot find it anywhere.

Thanks for your time.

Ric