When Slackware 12 was released I installed it in an oldish (1998) laptop with somewhat limited capacity.
At that time I only needed and installed the tty stuff (a ap d e ) and have been using it regularly.

Yesterday I thought I would like to try the blackbox window manager and I
installed everything in x and blackbox in xap.
I changed that link in/etc/X11/xinit from the default kde to blackbox.

On the command startx I see a quick flash of that Xauthority text.
Then the whole thing goes into limbo.
No response whatsoever from mouse or keyboard.
All I see is a blank screen.
If I switch off and start again it still works perfectly well as a tty only machine.

What have I missed ?

Any help on x-server fault finding appreciated.

Also maybe it was not necessary to install all of x.
What packages are needed just to get blackbox running?

John

Hi,

You did run the 'xorgconfig'? You can 'man xorgconfig' to get a better understanding of the command.

I will try xorgconfig this evening.
The manual is not exactly verbose.
I might not know all the answers.

Yesterday evening I tried X -configure.
It gave me a configuration file and encouraged me to try
X -config /root/xorg.conf.new but it only went into limbo again.

As I installed all of x I could also try twm.

John

If xorgconfig is confusing for you I suggest that you try xorgsetup. xorgsetup will automatically generate xorg.conf for you and set-up x windows for you. If that fails you can try to manually edit xorg.conf (see below).

# nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

You can run # xwmconfig to change the environment that you use (KDE, Blackbox, etc., depending on the environments that you've installed of course)

After trying a few of these tools I settled for this one :-

This gave an easy to use menu.
It stayed in tty.

After a lot of trial and error I found something that did not go into limbo.

However it did not startx.
It gave up with the famous last words :-

X.org Foundation list this as by far the most popular FAQ.

Comparing it with another Slackware installation which works I dont see the difference.

This is the first time I have had to look at X.
Always worked out of the box before.

Anyone know how to read those font.alias files?
What font is fixed looking for?

John

Edit
Seems a few others have had this type of problem recently.
Will be trying ideas posted by keefaz.