RH8.0 "forgot" my monitor, video card, and mouse settings

[David A. Karr]

I've had this problem or others related to it several times now.
I'll install RedHat 8.0 on my Linux box at home, and it all seems
to work fine. Then I'll try to install some new card or change
my monitor setting or something of that sort and I lose proper
response from the mouse and/or display in X.

After several repetitions of mouseconfig, xf86config, etc., I may
get a little closer to a working system but may or may not get all
the way there. The frustrating thing is that when I boot from the
installation CD, it has no trouble at all with the display or the
mouse--I can install in graphical mode just fine--and anaconda
will very nicely restore my X to a working condition too ... but
only if I do a full reinstall that wipes out everything on the
hard drive.

The frustrating thing is, although I can always back up, install
Linux, and restore my data (and I just did so for a HDD upgrade,
where it was obviously the thing to do!), it seems extremely
wasteful to have to do this when all I want is to restore the
X configuration that I already had once before.

And if I could solve that then maybe I could also solve the issue
that sometimes it seems I can set up my video card at install time
so that it effectively has 8 or 16 or whatever MB of RAM (although
the vast majority of this is on the motherboard), and other times
it gets only the 512 KB that are actually on the card, and I have
not been able to determine what it is I did differently to get
one outcome or the other. It would of course be a lot easier to
debug this if I didn't have to do a several-hour reinstall each
time I wanted to try to change it.

I'm thinking at this point I should just buy a cheap 32 MB video
card and a new mouse to throw onto this system. If I'm lucky,
kudzu will detect the new hardware and help me configure it
without having to do yet another full installation of Linux.
Seems kind of silly since the old card and mouse were doing the
jobs I asked them to do (basically slow graphics at 1024x768, and
point and click!) until I changed the HDD, but as long as I
don't know about any tools I can actually use to restore and tune
my mouse and video when the configuration breaks, it wastes a lot
more of my time than the cost of the new hardware.

This is such a stupid situation that I am sure I must be missing
some very simple solution. What is it?

David

[Peter T. Breuer]

David A. Karr <david@porchwithhouse.com> wrote:

> After several repetitions of mouseconfig, xf86config, etc., I may
> get a little closer to a working system but may or may not get all

Then don't use them. Edit your XF86Config[-4] to be the way you like
it, and keep it that way.

> The frustrating thing is, although I can always back up, install
> Linux, and restore my data (and I just did so for a HDD upgrade,

The XF86Config[-4] file is all you need.

> where it was obviously the thing to do!), it seems extremely
> wasteful to have to do this when all I want is to restore the
> X configuration that I already had once before.

Then do so!


Peter