Having trouble with X11/X86; starts up, but no desktop
 

Hi everyone. So I started with DSL and used its debian frugal installer to install it to the harddrive. So now I can boot from the hard drive, and I've apt-get'd it to Sarge. However, now it does not completely load up the GUI. I can use startx to get the odd background with the X as a cursor, but that's it. It will wait for a second, then go back to the terminal saying waiting for xserver to shutdown. The log in Xfree86___.log reports error opening security policy file, among some other non-essential errors. I have to say that I am more used to using the xorg version of xserver, and I don't see any xorg specific logs.

Ps Does anyone know how I can get the logging virtual terminal working? Im used to it being on tty4 or tty6, but it isn't.

Here is some info that may be useful:
NVIDIA Geforce fx 5500 graphics 128MB
Kernel 2.4.26 "i686 GNU/Linux" (Although it really is debian.)
Using updates from Sarge edition of debian

If any more info is needed, please ask. And thank you for helping!

~TGP1994

What desktop environment is installed?
And why use such an old release? Lenny is stable.

I guess I kind of wanted to get used to dist-upgrading, and if possible, I would like to do it in a visual environment.

It seems like the prominent DTE is Fluxbox. Somehow it looks like it was deleted, (I'm looking in aptitude here,) but the configuration files were kept. Now I just need to get the Atheros AR5212 card working.

Speaking of which, last night, I actually got the wireless card working. However, rebooting this morning, it seems unable to detect my eth0 (LAN card) or ath0 (My wireless Atheros card.) This is all very strange, and even another reboot doesn't fix it. If need be, I can swap out the ethernet cord in this computer to the linux computer if packages need downloading.

Thank you so far for helping, although the problems seem to keep cropping up.

EDIT: By the way, the error for bringing up my network cards looks like this:
lspci still shows it and eth0 like normal, too.

EDIT2: Hehe, well, I fixed the wireless problem. Turns out it was not loading the modules for whatever reason. So running modprobe ath_pci, then running ifup ath0, did the trick. Hope that answer helps some one, but I still need help on my original problem.

Ok, I think I fixed the fluxbox problem as well. All I had to do was download the fluxbox package, then run xinit. If you could still help me on the Logging TTY not working, that would be great.

Install Lenny.

Sarge hasn't been supported for over a year, even Etch loses support this month.

So can I simply edit my source.list to upgrade to lenny? What source(s) should I put in for the upgrade?

No.
Back up your configs and personal files to some media type and starta fresh install.
In the event that your monitor has some odd refresh or your card won't configure x properly, save xorg.conf also.

Aww, that seems to kind of defeat the purpose of what I'm doing... I'll see how far I can get. And you wouldn't happen to know why the computer freezes after I try to resume from standby, would you? I press the space bar after it's in standby, it makes a high pitched beep, the screen comes on, frozen at wherever it was last. The keyboard does not respond at all, numlock light does not change. The only way to get out of this freeze is by a hard reboot.