Thanks for the help. I am making a concerted effort to do everything in the terminal and just purchased books to learn in depth.
Here is my video card type.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 (PCIE)] You have mail in /var/spool/mail/root
Result of second command below:
Screen 0: minimum 640 x 480, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024 default connected 1280x1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm 1280x1024 0.0* 1024x768 0.0 800x600 0.0 640x480 0.0
finally when i typed in "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" I got the following
[root@Matt ~]# /var/log/Xorg.0.log -bash: /var/log/Xorg.0.log: Permission denied
Thanks again for the help it is much appreciated
Matt
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
Matt, first of all, welcome to the Linux community! :-)
On Monday 18 January 2010 17:52:56 Matt Smith wrote:
this is the message i get when trying to run system-config-display after installing it
It is a good idea not to rely on GUI tools, especially when troubleshooting something.
This is how I would proceed --- plug in all monitors you have, open a terminal (xterm, konsole, shell, any such will do), and type:
lspci | grep VGA
(and press the enter/return key) to find out exactly what video hardware is being detected. Feel free to copy&paste the above command into a terminal, if you don't feel like typing. Then copy&paste the output of that when replying here.
Second, type
xrandr
into the terminal, and copy&paste that output also into a reply.
Once we have that information, we can tell you if any drivers need to be installed and how, and what to do to enable both monitors. Also, feel free to attach the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file to the message --- it might look cryptic to you at first, but it is an ultimate information source about what is going on with your display. It contains a lot of useful info (once you get accustomed to reading it).
HTH, :-) Marko
P.S. Since you are a newcomer to Linux, keep in mind that CLI (command line interface) terminals and shells are a Good Thing --- they can save a lot of time and grief, and are ultimately used when all GUI's fail... :-) The faster you learn to use the terminal (or at least get comfortable with the idea of using it) the easier you will learn Linux. And soon enough you will also find out that terminal is way more powerful than any GUI. This is a big change of perspective compared to Windows (where the MS-DOS prompt is useful only to a small minority of know-how people), and one of the first things newcomers typically stumble upon. ;-)