i know i posted this somewhere else in the board but maybe this will end my undying frustration...

I am having a similar problem when trying to run X with mandrake 9.2...

My monitor (NEC MultiSync HR17) and video card (S3 Savagee4) are both listed under XFdrake...

I am attempting to run X under an 800x600 16bpp configureation...but when X attempts to load I simply get a blue screen with a black "x cursor" on it...on top of that to get out of X I am having to reboot my machine...

any suggestions on how to fix this? BTW I am attempting to run a Gnome GUI

any help with this would be much appreciated
/apoc

oh yeah i am using XFree 4.3

Could be the window manager is a simple one that just shows a blue screen with a black cross. Try right clicking - to get a menu. Try double clicking, middle clicking, etc.

As you probably know ctrl-alt-backspace should get out of X.

well i just re installed and compiled mandrake 9.2...just to make sure that wasn't the problem...i have KDE on it now...still having the same problem

Just the obvious suggestion for a newbie.

i tried right clicking but that didn't even work

Its possible that the video card doesn't have enough RAM. When I first built my computer I bought new components except for the video card which I took from a really old computer. I got everything workin except that when I typed startx (I had it set to boot into CLI mode) the screen went like grey and only an X was in the middle. You could not move the X and had to force reboot. After a while I upgraded to a 32MB V-Card and everything worked fine. I doubt you need 32MB of VRAM but make sure you have at least 16.

blue screen, black cursor.... you have not got a window manager loaded at all. try leaving and running "startkde"

i can try the startkde...but i have a new development...i got X to run once...but now it is back to the blue screen with the x cursor..i can move the cursor and can do ctrl+alt+bksp to get back to the CLI...so if anyone else has anyother ideas let me know

ok i have tried startkde now and it is telling me that
a) modmap cannot load display and
b) $Display has not been set

still lost beyond belief

Might this help with modmap?

$DISPLAY is presumably an environment variable just set it by doing:
$DISPLAY=<somethingorother>
You'll have to find out what from the manual or something. To check it's set do:
set | grep $
If you need to set $DISPLAY permanently put:
$DISPLAY=<somethingorother>
export $DISPLAY
I think, in your .bashrc or .bash_profile file, can't recall which one. Having said that the variable is only used inside X I think so it might be best put in ?.xinitrc or ?.xsession??

However it would be much nicer if these problems didn't arrise in the first place. So may be missing the real problem.

If it were me I'd first look in .xinitrc (is it?) or .xsession, in home directory, and see if it ends with 'exec <name of a window manager>'. Stick in something like 'exec fvwm2' (assuming fvwm2, a window manager, is on your path) to see what happens. Or remove everything except the final exec line.

An easy option might be to install Enlightenment, a window manager, because it has the alarming habit of overwriting .xinitrc with its own thing, or used to. Hope helps.

I am having the sme problem with the blue screen and black X cursor. I am running Gnome and MDK10.0 not sure what the issue is but i am going to try the recofig option tonight.