Excited about my new Slackware - which is up and running in multiple partitions - but I do need a GUI occasionally.

Details about the monitor and the mouse.

At boot, there is a message:
"gpm: oops() involved from gpm.c(977)
/dev/mouse: No such device"

I have an optical mouse, USB, and that's how I set it up at install. It's listed as /dev/gpmdata in xorg.conf, which I changed from /dev/mouse because of this boot error, but the message still persists. Don't yet know if the mouse is working in this setup because I haven't yet gotten beyond the CLI.

The monitor type I goofed at installation, and set it up as VGA. I now know I should probably use VESA because my monitor is only 1 year old.

How do I change the monitor settings? Changing "VGA" to "VESA" in xorg.conf hasn't helped, probably because I don't know the other settings. I also tried Setup-Configure on disc 1, but there was nothing there.

Now to the core problem. startx doesn't start X. Ominous messages:


"XSERVTransSocketOpenCOTSServer: Unable to open socket for inet 6
XSERVTransOpen: transport open failed for inet6/[my name] :0
XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: failed to open listener for inet6"

It also lists these errors:

"(EE) VGA(0): Driver can't support depth 24
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration

Fatal server error: no screens found

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0known processed) with 0 events remaining."


Graphics card is NVidia GeForce 4 MX Integrated GPU(nv)
(This information taken from exact same machine under SuSE 9.3 two months ago.)

My monitor operated at 24 bits in SUSE for several months. I downloaded and installed NVIDIA'S driver already.

No problems with Slackware detecting my Ethernet card and network, and I'm learning to appreciate the links browser.

Any suggestions appreciated.

on the device section for your graphic card, did you change the Driver to "nvidia"??

about the mouse ... how did you set it up at the installation? the xorg.conf file should have "IMPS/2" as the driver but you need the mouse to work properly from GPM first. the out the utility for the mouse with pkgtool

First of all, I would recommend saving your current xorg configuration file as something like xorg.conf.old and then running "xorgconf" in a shell, if you havn't done so already. Then, I would recommend downloading and compiling the official nvidia driver from the nvidia website. It isn't that hard to install, and is well documented. After doing that, edit the "driver" line under video card in your xorg.conf file to read "nvidia".

OK, good point on the graphics card. I have not changed that yet.

The mouse was set up in installation as a busmouse, since it's USB.

mmm ok... though I shall tell you how I make my USB mice work, so it can work for you too

as root, type pkgtool, enter to the Setup section, press the space bar over the mouse line and press enter. Select the imps2 type and reboot, you'd have your mouse working with GPM after that (hope so lol)

OK, I'm getting there. startx gives me a desktop now, but the mouse doesn't work even when I set it up as you describe. I think I need to play around more with xorgconfig and manually editing to get it right.

I appreciate your help.

thanks, though there should be someway to make it work... try to get it working with GPM first, I think it must work first on the terminal than on X

I'm sure you don't need it to work in a term first, then on X. I turned off GPM when I got fed up with garbage output in terminals after exiting X.

Since then I just have it set to explorerPS/2 and now I use edev. Both worked fine.
If you have no luck with a USB mouse, you could always use the usb-serial adaptor and use in standard mouse port. Save the usb port for something more useful.