I got the diagnostic information you spoke of and it was in two parts:> $ /sbin/lspci revealed that my card is an
> VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82740 (i740) AGP Graphics Accelerator (rev 21).
and the startx command does not work.
In what way does it "not work"? I would expect:
$ startx &> x.output
to wait a while, write some output to the file x.output and then return to the shell prompt on your system (because X is broken). The information written to the x.output file is what we're after here.
Another point: When I do the: init 5 command
Don't do this. It won't work until you've fixed your X configuration.
Also, In my grub.conf on the kernel line I was advised to put a "nofb" parameter to solve an earlier problem. Could this be getting in the way now? It was a display problem that time also but the screen was black then.
Possibly, I don't know.
Paul.
