hey people, im a linux newbie... i managed to install ubuntu on my hd, but im having some trouble...

the boot process goes well but finally when im the GUI kicks in the output on the monitor is very messed up.. what i see can be described as the log in screen cut into rectangular pieces and then rearranged randomly..

what i do next is press control alt f6 to get to the terminal command line thingy... then i do

/etc/init.d/gdm stop to stop the GUI

if i do dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg i noticed that setting have defaulted back to other values (not using the xenosfb driver)... even after putting in the values if i run

/etc/init.d/gdm start to start the GUI

i still the get same crappy screen... However if i type in

startx

ubuntu boots straight up and works nicely, with a couple of error msgs, but i can see everything perfect... i need one of two things...

1. either make linux run the startx command for booting the gui instead of whatever its doing now (/etc/init.d/gdm start is my guess)
2. make sure im edditing the right conf file and make sure the values are being saved

as i said im a linux noob, im sure/hoping this should be an easy fix... any linux gurus care to help.. thanks!

damn i feel stupid...

after some reading and looking around... i noticed that my monitor does not support the 1280x768 resolution that the Ubuntu install tutorial says we should select...

for some reason gdm was trying to work on this resolution, but when i started GUI thru the startx command, it would start at 1024x768 which my monitor does support... all i had to do was sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and choose 1024x768... now gdm is loading up just fine...

thing is that despite my monitor not supporting 1280x768, it does show an image on screen.. if it had just gone black or failed to run or kicked me back out to command thingy then i would have known for sure that the resolution was not supported... oh well... hope someone will find this thread useful at some point in time... cheers