So I'm working off of a clean slackware 10.2 install now. Terminal works perfectly, and I can still be productive without any sort of window manager, but having one would be nice. The X11 and window manager packages where installed upon setting up the system, however, when I type startx or xorgconfig I get a command not found error. What might this be from and how do I fix it? I've confirmed that the xorg.conf file exists and makes sense (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) but still the command is not found. First time I've encountered this. Thanks.

Did you by any chances tried to run that when suing into root? If you did, try using su - that will load PATH correctly. PATH contains all the directories where binaries should be searched.

If you didn't su, then try to see if the file exists, ls -l /usr/X11R6/bin/startx
If not, get the x11 packages and install them again.

wow thanks, the ls command showed that startx exists and upon running it by absolut path it can't find more commands, such as xauth and so on. When I booted, I logged into root, created a new user, and then su'd back to root. is the suing what caused the problem? Also, should the new user I created be able to run startx upon logon in the terminal? Sorry for my relative ignorance on the details of linux.

Probably it's related to using su command, check with the user, you should be able to run X from it too.

Thanks, apparently the su was the problem. When I log on initially as either root or my user I now can exicute startx. Thanks. As an aside, could some one breifly explaine why switching the user causes this to happen? Thanks.

You are not allowed to su into root and startx in slackware.
I suspect for security reasons, so you don't forget and go surfing out on the web as root.

Someone else here may have a better reason or know exactly why it's not allowed.

Kaamoss, take a look at su's man page by issuing the command: man su

You'll see that if you execute su <user> (if you ommit user it will default to root) it will change to it, but won't load the enviroment values. To do that, you need to add a - to the command, like su - <user> .

The default search directories for executable files when you don't specify a full path is given by a enviroment value called PATH (you can see this by typing echo $PATH). If you don't use the - in su, it won't load the default profile which sets this variable (/etc/profile). So, if you don't use the -, the user you switched too won't "know" where startx or other files are.

Awesome. Thank you for the explaination, I appreciate it. I finally made the full linux leap on my main machine and have no windows partition so I'm sure I'll be reading many more man pages and making more posts on here.