Rick Commo wrote: <snip>
Tried XF86Setup a couple of times, always picking "ATI Xpert 98" for the card and changing some of the monitor characteristics. Always failure - both when XF86Setup starts up the xserver or when I would type "startx". Occasionally a particular combo would get past the "Done" of XF86Setup without failing and give me the "Congratulations you've got a running XServer" page, but after I saved the configuration file and tried "startx" manually it would fail. Gave up for the night.
If you ever find yourself in a similar situation in the future, you might try using the GENERIC VGA CARD (or whatever it's called); it's not what you'll want to stick with of course, but it might give you enough success to encourage you on to better success.
<snip>
I was really perplexed about why it was working but I didn't want to look a gift-horse in the mouth so logged in as root
<snip>Bad habit to get into. Please don't log in as root. Log in as a normal user and "su" or "sudo" when you need root access.
<snip>
LESSON 3: Make sure that you can reboot quickly and efficiently so that you don't put it off like I did. Had I done reboots after getting a configuration that allowed the Xserver to start from XF86Setup I might have had a working system earlier!
QUESTION 1: This is directly related to LESSON 3 and is aimed at the gurus who monitor this reflector. Why does typing "startx" fail even though XF86Setup successfully started the X server? I had several instances of getting some combo of card and monitor choice where this was the scenario. It could have avoided a lot of thrashing.
<snip>Can't answer the question entirely, but when you rebooted, apparently the system started xdm (or an equivalent such as gdm, kdm, etc), which brought up the graphical login screen and started X. Why xdm would work and startx would not is a mystery that'll have to wait for someone else to answer or for more info to become available. One possibility is that you have a .xinitrc or .xsession file in your home directory that was trying to start a non-existent window manager of that had some sort of other problem, whereas xdm may have been configured to bypass your .xinitrc/.xsession file.
I'm very glad you're making progress. I got started with Linux about 2.75 years ago, and expected to "be comfortable" with Linux in 6 months; it took 2.5 years, and now that I'm comfortable, I'm still no guru. Linux has so much available, and it's growing in so many different directions so fast, who can keep up? But it's a great adventure. Have fun.
Kent