Re: Oops, a problem

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Ian Wright wrote:
> It worked - for some reason I couldn't get XF86Setup to run before, hence
> the panic mode!!! I think the trouble was that I had done a 'startx' before
> I tried XF86Setup and so this rebelled as the 'startx' had convinced the
> machine that no video modes were available. However, I sneaked a 'XF86Setup'
> in as soon as the machine booted and took it by surprise and so it is now
> back under full control............ until I decide I know what I'm doing
> again........watch this space ;o)

Yep, that would do it ;). Remember, though, you don't have to have X
running all the time: if it comes up at boot time, you're running at
runlevel 5 - you can switch to runlevel 3 by issuing the 'init 3' command
as root. That usually kills off X temporarily.
Also, you can have as many X sessions on your machine as you pretty well
like: you can tell XF86Setup to start up on a different display, which
would start another X server. In fact, you can do this with startx as
well. The command is something like 'startx --:1' I would think. Many
people think that X is some sort of shell over the command line in a
similar manner to Win3 over DOS - it's not. The two are completely and
utterly separate, and having one X-server running doesn't stop you
starting another...

Cheers,

Alex.

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