Jeffrey and Luke,

You two have helped me a lot with my display problem installing SL 4.2, and
I wanted to report my final success.

Recall that I was unable to get system-config-display to select _any_ moni-
tor from its list, and I was stuck with 640x480 resolution and 8-bit color
on a 21 inch CRT display.  Checking whether any needed files were missing
didn't reveal anything.

Some progress first appeared when I started, on your suggestion, to edit
xorg.conf directly.  Then I discovered that system-config-display could be
invoked with all options from the command line, specifying resolution, vi-
deoram size, color depth, etc.  I tried this in several iterations, saving
the output to xorgtest.conf, expecting that file now to have all the right
information.  Instead it contained the same nonsense as did the original
xorg.conf.

So I gave up on that and went back to the only thing that showed progress
so far, editing xorg.conf.  After carefully making sure all the monitor
parameter values typed in were consistent and correct, and not including
the highest resolution of 1600x1200 as too high, I re-booted and - nearly
fell off my chair - there was 1280x1024 by 16-bit color.  And now I could
pick resolutions, and reset to 1280x960.  Also, LVM, which previously dis-
appeared as soon as its window appeared, now works fine.  The only minor
glitch is that near the bottom of some tall windows, or near the bottom of
the screen, a non-synced pattern appears, making text there illegible.
This is easily eliminated by clicking on the screen or scrolling in the
window, so isn't more than a minor annoyance.  I suspect it's caused by a
deficient video driver (it never happens in OS/2 using the SNAP driver).

As for the mis-behavior of system-config-display, my speculation is that
the instructions in the file xconf.py, which python2 uses as input, are
somehow messed up.  I tried to examine xconf.py, but since I don't under-
stand the python language, could only get a faint sense of what it's doing,
certainly not enough to discern any flaws.  A comment in that file mentions
that there's an inconsistency between the database and what's detected, but
whether that's relevant or not I don't know.

I hope this description of my experiences is of some use to anyone else who
happens to encounter the same display problem.

Once again, thank you for your help in getting around this problem.

- Dushan