New Gentoo install; Dell Dimension E510 with Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE, USB keyboard and optical mouse. Basic install went well, complete with custom (i.e. not genkernel) kernel.

To get usb keyboard/mouse and my nvidia card working with Xorg, I created a hybridized xorg.conf composed of the screen/device/monitor/display created by "nvidia-xorgconf" and the evdev input device section from what I believe was the xorg.conf.example generated during the Xorg emerge.

Everything was working as root, but when I changed to normal user, xterm complained about not being able to find "/bin/ksh" (my SHELL=/bin/ksh) and after about 3 seconds, Xorg would shut down. So I went into /etc/env.d/99local and commented out the SHELL=/bin/ksh line, ran "env-update" and then tried to "startx" again. The video still works, but X no longer sees my mouse (keyboard still works). This is true both as normal user and as root.

I don't know if I believe that this is all related to not using the default shell, but I cannot recall any other changes made to environment variables. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

(I know I should include config files, but not sure how. If you would like to see my config files, please explain a CLI way to cut-and-paste them w/o a mouse.)

I guess it really *is* all about SHELL: if I

or
Xorg works fine, regardless of whether the user is root or normal_user. So, I

su to root,
write a change to /etc/env.d/99local and
restart

... only to get
Does anyone know of other files where SHELL is set? I'm stumped. Thanks.

(By the way: I also get

but xterm complains that it cannot find "/bin/ksh". I suppose the best solution would be to help Xorg/xterm find ksh, as that *is* my preferred shell.)

I finally changed SHELL to /bin/bash, but the behavior didn't change: xterm says it cannot find /bin/bash, and X closes after about 3 seconds. Does anyone know what's going on? I am looking for xterm config file documentation, I'll post if/when I am able to specify a shell file path in the xterm config file. Will also check my local profile to see if that can be changed.

I found a workaround: I added the following line to my
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

export SHELL=/bin/ksh

I believe I could have added that line to my /etc/make.conf or my .profile, but I'll try those later.

I still don't know why X couldn't "find" (execute?) whatever shell was defined in SHELL. Permissions? Any ideas let me know. Thanks.