Re: More X setup fun!
On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Shaul Peleg wrote:
> I am having trouble getting X windows to run. I am *nix illiterate. The
> documentation that I found did not help. My system is fairly simple - I
> have a simple Trident Providia 9865 based board with 2 megs. After I
> setup using generic VGA / VGA16 base / afterstep I run startx and the
> screen goes blank. I then see a list where everyline starts with ( )
> where some have a ** inside. I looked at .xsession-errors in my home dir
> and found that afterstep couldn't find some file with a '.hook' suffix.
> Is this why the window manager doesn't come up? Should the screen still
> stay black?
> My .xsession is simple - xterm blah blah blah &
> exec afterstep
> I am just trying to get something to come up! The setup program looks
> fine - can anyone help?!
>
> Thanks
>
Well, seeing those lines where everything starts with a ( ) is to be
expected - they tell you what's going on - and to really figure this
problem out, you need to find out what those lines are saying. The
easiest way to do this is:
startx 2>&1 | tee myxlogfile.log
This line says, in effect, "run startx, copy the standard error to the
standard output, and run the output through the command 'tee
myxlogfile.log'". 'tee' is a wonderful command that writes what it
receives as input to a file and to its output, so this way you'll still
get to see all those lines. (If for some reason you don't have tee,
replace '| tee myxlogfile.log' with '> myxlogfile.log')
You can then look at 'myxlogfile.log' after you kill the server (with a
control-C on the screen on which you ran startx, or a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
on the screen of the Xserver). If you're having more trouble, including
this file in your post to the list will help greatly.
My guess is that you'll see some lines complaining about monitor
frequencies not matching what they need to for certain video modes (now
why XF86Setup will create a XF86Config file with monitor timings that are
just a little bit off is beyond me, but I've found that it does do this on
occasion), and the video modes being subsequently deleted. The fix for
this (or at least, what I remember working for me) was to go edit
/etc/X11/XF86Config and find the line that lists the monitor's horizontal
and vertical scan frequencies. You may have to edit this file more than
once, since X will only tell you about the first problem it finds in a
video mode (so if both the horizontal and vertical scan frequencies are a
bit off, you'll only find out about one once you fix the other)
Your .xsession should be fine, and the message in .xsession-errors almost
certainly doesn't have anything to do with your problem - it relates to
the standard Debian window manager init scripts, and can be safely
ignored. (or rather, you might want to look into creating these .hook
files and adding interesting things into them, but only after you've fixed
this problem) If a window manager doesn't come up, you should still get
your xterm, a gray screen, and a mouse cursor.
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