For some reason, whenever I play a game that autimaticly changes the video reselution at full screen, the x server crashes. It dosn't happen when I log in as root. What's wrong?

Welcome to LQ.

I'm affraid it's terminal! Geddit? No, seriously, there's virtually no way for us to diagnose a problem on that small amount of information. Could you tell us some more? Look in the X log files (/var/logs/XFree86.?.log) and check for errors? Anything.

For some reason, when I put my foot on the accelerator of my car, it lunges forward and then stops. What's wrong? - You see, it's impossible to answer without more information.

Well, I'm not on my box right now, cuz I'm at school. As near as I can tell, this is a bug common to mandrake, since I've used SuSE, Redhat, ASP, Turbo Linux, and Lycoris on the same exact box with no problems. But with Mandrake 8.2 and 9.0, ive had the same problem. This is what happens: whenever I load a game that is a 640/480 resoilution while my desktop is at 800/600, the x server seems to crash while the video mode changes. I have this problem as ANY normal user, but not as root. Is that specific enough? If not, I'll bring my logs on a floppy tomorow. (I post from school)

I still have this problem! Will someone please help me?

THis is just off the wall. Try adding yourself to the games group and/or the xfs group.

This is something that always happens to me, and my guess is that the game doesn't have permission to draw on the root window (chances are that any given Linux problem is basically a permission conflict).

One trick that sometimes works is if you change the mode of your game's binary to root. So for instance, you would go to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and do "chmod 777 fullscreen_game" and "chown root fullscreen_game". Giving it unlimited power is probably overkill, but I don't like to take chances when video games are at stake.

Thanks, everyone. I'll try again when I get home.