error running startx
 

When running startx, my screen goes blank for a few seconds, as if it is loading up fine. I then get a message that says this:

xterm: error while loading shared libraries: libutempter.so.0: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory

Presumably, I need some file. I may have it somewhere on my hard drive. I had to install XFree86 in a bizzarro way. What file or directory do I need? Also, where should it go?

Probably because you didn't install it correctly. How did you?

What distro are you using? You could get the XFree86 packages, to set it easily.

what exactly do you mean by bizzaro way?

I'm using Slackware 9.1. Zipslack, actually. As far as how I installed Xfree86, here goes. I downloaded all the .tgz files in Windows and then moved them to my Linux directory. When I started up Linux, the files where renamed automatically and didn't end in .tgz anymore, thus I couldn't install them. I tried renaming them in Linux but, for some reason, this caused them to disappear. I went back to Windows. The files where where they should be but not renamed. I renamed them back to their original names and made copies in the Windows folder I originally downloaded them into. Going back to Linux, the names were changed again automatically. I went to the Windows folder where I had saved backups and installed the packages from there. This appeared to work fine and files appear to be where they should be. I didn't get any error messages when installing the packages. I'm going to try to reinstall them. Maybe I just didn't install one of them or something.

as far as i know it is impossible to compile xfree from source under zipslack.
i tried it but the fat32 filesystem screwed it up, mainly because it's case insensitive and the shell scripts/makefiles/whatever are trying to use files with a particular case, and dos/windoze is renaming them (prettifying i think the call it +o(), and they're just not finding them.
maybe there is a pre-compiled xfree available for zipslack, i just gave up and installed redhat when a virus wiped out my windoze install.