Techie blues

Or, rather, non-techie blues. I've found out that I'm not as technically inclined as I'd like to think.

I'm trying to install Red Hat 5.2 on my oldish laptop. Well, I have installed it (eventually) but I can't access the X Window System because of something to do with how I've configured my video card or monitor. I keep going through lots of different combinations of options and when I type startx to go to the control panel I come up with alternately:

• black screen (what I started off with)
• black screen with two orange horizontal lines
• grey screen
• being able to see the control panel, but:
  • everything's moved to the right by a third of a screen-width
  • the display is duplicated on top of itself but slightly off (so I can't read any of it)
  • there are lots of horizontal green jittery lines
• being able to see the control panel but it's rather fuzzy and it starts tiling vertically from about 2/3 the way down the screen. Including the mouse cursor.

This is not ideal and I'm trying to get it sorted, with the help of someone cleverer than me. In the meantime I'm feeling depressed for Reasons #43c and #43d: "There's technology around that I'm trying to do things with and it's not behaving like it should," and, "I'm spending a lot of time trying to fix it and not really getting anywhere."

But then again, I Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles has just come onto Winamp. And how can you be depressed while that's playing?