Gnome won't load on startup

[Neurofiend]

Greetings all... I'm very new to linux (just started using it today), so please please please keep your responses simple enough for me to understand.

Now on to business. After installing fedora core 2 (and fiddling with it a little) I tried to activate my second display. I found and finished setup easily enough, but now when I boot up linux gnome won't load. It doesn't even seem to go through startup; I just get sent to the command line. I suspect this has something to do with my choice of display during setup (My monitor and box markings say ViewSonic VE175b, and linux seems to detect it as VE175b-2 (why oh why didn't I notice that line on startup sooner)). Any information on how to restore my previous gnome display settings, or suggestions as to what another cause might be will be greatly appreciated.

[tashirosgt]

You choice of words "activate my second display" confuses me. Do you use two monitors at the same time? Or were you using one monitor to install and then decided to use a different one?

[tormented_one]

I had the same problem on fc2 and slackware 10 I found my fix was in the bios i had to turn up the video mem. is your video card onboard? to see if its whats wrong change the xorg.conf file at the defaultdepth to 8 or 16, but 16 might not work so try both. hope this helps

[FreeEagle]

Hi Friends,

try to talk to him easy, he is new in Linux World , so i thin we have to explain everything to him with details.

Dear Friend,
try to tell us what you did exactly and what hardware you have ? Do you use Two Monitors?
We will try to do our best.


Best Regards,
FreeEagle

[Neurofiend]

Sorry about the confusing language. Yes I have 2 monitors, my crt (a dell monitor, don't laugh it's the only way I could get it for free) and my lcd (viewsonic). The crt worked fine on boot up, I just wanted to get my lcd working as a second display to show a different desktop (or extend the current one, I haven't really decided yet). I'm using a nvidia geforce 4 with dual display output (a vga, and a dvi with vga adapter); my crt is in the vga (primary) and my lcd is in the dvi (secondary).

[tashirosgt]

I've never had two monitors going at once, so I don't know what you did to setup the second monitor. I suggest you begin the troubleshooting by looking at the log file the X server writes.
It will be named /var/log/Xorg.0.log or something like that.
After loggin in the text window as root, use the command
less /var/log/Xorg.0.log
to examine the messages from the system. See if you find that there is some error when it tries to start the X server. (Use the up and down arrow keys, type q to quit , when you are finished reading them).

Post the relevant looking section to the forum. In case you need to get the messages file to another machine, you can copy this file to a floppy by using the command
mcopy /var/log/Xorg.0.log a:
if you your installation included the mtools commands.

[Neurofiend]

YAY.... It's finally over

I'd like to thank everyone that tried to help me

I managed to fix my problem by restoring my old display settings. I did this by going to "/etc/X11/" (thank you tashiro for showing me that log file which directed me here) to find the "Xorg.conf" and "Xorg.conf.backup" files. I deleted the "Xorg.conf" file and renamed "Xorg.conf.backup" to "Xorg.conf". This seems to have restored my settings prior to setting up my second display. There was probably a nicer (safer?) way of dealing with this, but you can't argue with results.

Also, I set up (or tried to at least) my second monitor by clicking on the hat (does it have a name?) at the bottom left, and going to system settings. I then clicked on the "display" tab. Under display there is a tab called "dual head" which allows you to set up multiple displays (maybe I could've been clearer if I had all this info sooner, but I couldn't get at it since gnome wouldn't load).