Doug wrote:
continuing on, I have reinstalled the entire machine from scratch. This time, leaving my sources.list with stable. it still hangs when I go to load X (I use runlevel 3 to run X, I default to runlevel 2, which I have as just a console login) any other things I can try to get this Xserver from using 99% of my cpu power and making the machine itself unresponsive expect to ssh from a remote computer? This is rather annoying because I can't run anything gui on the local machine. -rp
Probably such advice is frowned upon here, but it can never hurd to have a look what knoppix makes of it - try putting a knoppix cd in there - and when the graphics card is detected fine, copying /etc/X11/XF86config* from knoppix to the hard disc just *might* solve all problems :-) It did here when I had X configuration problems
Also if you want to keep a "clean" /etc/X11/XF86config-4 (which is the file in question being faulty, probably), you could just copy it from knoppix to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.knoppix and have a look at different settings; that'll take more tweaking ofcourse... but it might be interesting as you may find out where the actual problem is; if you can't find out you can replace XF86Config-4 in the end anyway
HTH, Joris