Comments added inline. At 01:23 PM 11/13/02 -0600, James Miller wrote:
It means you're on your own with it, as far as the X developers are concerned. It may work, or it may not ... but don't bother to send in bug reports.Ok. I think I've now got my X problems down to more standard issues on this mnimal Slack 8.1 install (2.4.18 kernel). I was able to get the updated kernel to run, and I am no longer getting the crash with its log. But something is still wrong. I got the new kernel going, went through xf86config again. This time, I managed to find some sync values for my monitor (14" epson extended vga -old!) which I entered in (30-35.5; 70) and selected my S3 Trio 64V+ video card. There was a caveat about this card being "basically unsupported" - whatever that means.
This could be any of several things ... especially with an unsupported card ... but the most likely is that you have told the X server to use a refresh rate (an hsync or vsync ... apparently the variable names these days are HorizSync and VertRefresh) that your monitor will not support. Double check your values, or switch to more conservative ones.So, now, when I go "startx" from the command line, the HD runs and things seem to be happening, but the screen goes blank and just sits there. By "blank" I mean that it goes dark - like screen blanking when you have no screen saver. And, it just sits there. I expect it to give some sort of background - like crosshatching - and for an "X' to appear for the mouse cursor. But no such thing ever happens. It just sits there blank (no message about a server crash, no odd activity like HD churning). So, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Could someone advise me?
Also, what default screen size and bit depth are you using? (Check the X error log, or redirect X's STDERR to a file, for example with "startx >xerrors.txt 2>&1".) Try making 640x480, 8-bit color the first choice, as really old monitors may not support anything better (but rarely will fail to support it).
Do you have access to the system from anything othet than the console? (For example, can you ssh or telnet in, or do you have a serial display connected?) When the screen is "dark", if you press CTRL-ALT-F2, do you get a console login back? (This will work for some monitors with sync problems, but not all ... you may need to power-cycle the monitor after you press the key combination ... and I don't know that even that will work reliably.)
fvwm95 is a Window Manager, the one that (if you don't look too closely) resembles Windows 95's GUI. There are newer ones, but this one is perfectly functional and a resaonable choice for low-end systems (other good choices for low-end systems are blackbox, my own preferred WM, and IceWM). And no, you don't need a WM to get "any display at all", just to get the modern conveniences (like menus and multiple displays) we expect from GUIs.I should also mention that I don't have a window manager configured yet, though I do have one installed - fvwm95. I assume that is a window manager because it has the letters "wm" in its name (hope I'm right). But I just don't know if I need a window manager to get any display at all out of X.
These apps (xdm is the one I'm actually familiar with) are login managers -- they let you start X from your init scripts or from /etc/inittab directly (I think Slackware does it the second way, in runlevel 5) and log in directly to X, instead of logging in to a console and running "startx".In closing, I'll just reaffirm my state of confusion regarding the way the gui works under Linux. Despite Ray's helpful comments to some questions I posed on this list earlier about how it all works, I've become even more confused. There are things called, for example, "gdm" or "kdm". I take the "dm" part to stand for "display manager." But I don't know how display managers relate to window managers or the other things connected with X that I asked about previously.
Then, there are "session managers," which are also a subject of confusion in all this.
I'm not acquainted with this term in an X context.
Each has a "preferred" WM associated with it (or at least Gnome does; I'm insufficiently familiar with KDE to be sure about it). Nonetheless, Gnome, and probably KDE, will run on top of any reasonably capable WM.To top it all off, I read an article at Linuxworld on X and Linux display that claimed that Gnome and KDE are *not* window managers, but rather thay they *contain* a window manager.
Perish the thought. I might say such a thing to someone who is both uninterested in trying to understand his or her system, -AND- who expects others to do his or her work for him or her, but you clearly do not fall into that category.So this seems some sort of meta-category with regard to the 3 part scheme Ray provided in his helpful comments. I don't know if I'll ever be able to grasp all this. But this can give an idea of how little I know and thus what help might be suitable to offer with respect to my X problems. Hopefully, you won't say "go back to Windows, you dummy!" :)
(Though, sadly, I do see such postings on occasion ... rarely here, thankfully.)
--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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