I am a bit confused about a few things. I don't really consider myself a complete newbie, but I have my moments.

So anyway, I run gentoo on an Athlon 950, GeForce2, blah blah. I installed xorg and am in the process of setting up fluxbox. Right now I am troubleshooting a few problems...but that is another thread in the software section. I am confused about a few of the commands, and how linux controls commands.

After installing X, to run X I have to either:

/etc/X11/X

or

source /etc/profile
startx

I don't really understand what I really going on here? Why can't I run startx after installing it? What exactly, does the source /etc/profile do? (this might be a gentoo thing...but I thought I'd ask)

Thanks~

Is you system wide bash_profile. When you source /etc/profile it just re-reads the script you just edited so it starts reading the new lines you edited, if you edited any.

You have to configure it first before you can use it.

From the command line...

I apologize for not being clear enough; I have X configured, I ran xorgconfig then edited my .conf file as needed. So I can run X fine...I just don't undertstand why startx, xdm, X, as commands, are not available to the user (root or regular) until I run source /etc/profile.

Does this script get edited when you install something? In my case using emerge...

I still need to run source /etc/profile...even after relogging in (I also tried a reboot). Isn't this script read when logging in? Is it possible my system is reading an older "version" perhaps from before I installed X? if so, how do I update it.

Thanks for the help!