Red Hat Knowledgebase

Note: if the system is having trouble booting into graphical mode, boot into runlevel 3. To enter runlevel 3 follow these steps or see related articles in the Knowledgebase:

• Start up the system and hit the space bar when the blue GRUB boot screen comes up. This will stop the boot process.
• Highlight the version the system is booting and press "e".
• Highlight the line that begins with the word "kernel" and press "e" again.
• At the end of that line, put a space and the number "3".
• Press Enter.
• Press "b" to boot.

Once the system comes up, log in as root, or login as a normal user and switch to root the root user.

Backing up and reconfiguring the X server configuration

The following commands will create a back-up of the xorg.conf directory and attempt to restore the X server configuration:

# mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
# system-config-display --reconfig

Try starting X with the startx command.

If the X server crashes, the next step is to change to a generic video driver.

Changing the graphics driver to the generic Vesa driver

In a text editor, open the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the "Driver" section. It will look similar to the following:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "i810"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "Intel 865"
EndSection

Note: Different systems will have different configurations, the above is an illustrative example. Change the driver line. In this example, change "i810" to "vesa". Note, the driver line may be different. Change it from "radeon", "nv", or some other driver to "vesa" that your system is configured for. Make sure to leave the "Identifier" line the same as well as the "VendorName" and "BoardName". After the change, the above example would look like following:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "vesa"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "Intel 865"
EndSection

Try starting X with the startx command.