Hello,

I've just installed Slackware 10 and I'm having a weird problem and I don't have any idea what is causing it.

Whenever I try to start x, no matter what window manager I choose, The screen flips out of command line mode and to a screen with lots of vertical, colored, solid pinstripes in a repeating pattern. (It's really hard to look at)
The only way to get out of this is to Ctrl-Alt-F1 back to command line and the Ctrl-C the X server/display/whatever.

I've never experienced this probelm or anything like it before and I have no idea what this means.

What is this and how can I fix it?

System:
256MB RAM
933MHz Pentium 3
Intel Integrated GFX (4 MB I think)

i have, distortions in the display like that usually mean you have bad sync rates set up, go back and fix those rates, to comply with your monitor.

No, it's not distortions; it just shows that repeating pattern of red,cyan,yellow and some other colors and nothing else; not even a cursor. It doesn't seem to be out of sync. It's not like static or a flickering pattern; it's just a bunch of solid lines, and nothing I do seems to affect them.

Something I've noticed: If I start X via xdm, I can (apparently) change the screen mode by pressing Ctrl-C
Also, according to the monitor's OSD, it's running in 640x480 and 85 Vrefresh.

Besides, last time I tried to mess with the sync settings I made it even worse and I couldn't fix it...

Here's an example:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/images/stp2.gif
It's almost exactly like that except that it's in color.

Post the output of the following commands:

With Xdm having been running in the background all day,

grep EE says:
WW says:
Would it make a difference if I rebooted the system and started X the normal way (eg. startx)?

Is that last log taken from after you had the problems. Every boot of X wipes the log clean and restarts the log file so you have to take it right after without starting up a new X.

The only thing I see is that in your xorg.conf file you have the vrefresh range set to something you monitor can't handle.

(WW) VESA(0): config file vrefresh range 40-90Hz not within DDC vrefresh ranges.

How can that be? I've just installed Slack and haven't done anything besides adding my zip drive to fstab.
And it really doesn't look like a refresh problem on the screen, but I'll take your word for it. (And also I'm pretty sure that 40-90 is within the monitors range)
So...how do I fix the rate and how do I know what rate to use?

Slack doesn't automatically configure X for you. What you've got is an utterly generic xorg.conf file which will work at a low resolution for *most* hardware out there. Yours, unfortunately, is one of those machines that just doesn't work quite right with that common denominator.

I suggest you run xorgcfg or xorgconfig as root.
You might have to specify the full path --
xorgcfg will try and write a working config automatically, while xorgconfig is a command-line question answer session that should get you a working config. From there, you can hand tweak to your liking.

--Shade

PS- Happy Slacking

Shade:
Didn't work.
I filled in the questions of xorgconfig to the best of my knowledge, it saved to /usr/.../etc directory (even though I thought I told it to use /etc/X11) and copied xorg.conf to /etc/X11 (because that's where X seemed to be looking for it and payed no attention to the new conf in the other dir).
Now it just says that it either couldn't find a usable screen, or it couldn't find a screen at all.

Also, xorgcfg does nothing at all. It just trys to start X and fails.

Well, I made a little bit of progress...
Now I can run X in 320x2?0 in 8-bit mode, but trying to set the depth any higher causes a "Dpeth not supported by current driver" error, and I don't even know why it's usung such a low resolution; the lowest in the list is 640x480!

How can I get a list of usable drivers, and how do I switch to one?

Edit: Nevermind, I figured out the problem. (Both of them, actually.)
As it turns out, there was a driver for my Intel 82810e gfx chip the whole time but I didn't recognize it because it was listed as 'i810e'.
Switched to that one, now I can run 8, 16 and 24-bit...but not 32-bit. Hmm...Well, that's probobly because of the gfx card.
Also, the problem with not being able to go above 800x600@56 was because I didn't know the sync ranges for my monitor. Fortunately, the monitor one of the few things I still have the manual for and was able to look it up. As soon as I put those values in there I suddenly gots BOATLOADS of resolutions.

So, Thank you everybody for your help, you were right even though I thought it was something else.