Installed 13.1 as a guest in VirtualBox with Debian Lenny 5 64bit as host. The mouse, gpm, and the keyboard work alright at the black screen but in the graphical thing, forget its name.....Xsomething, not KDE, there is no mouse or keyboard; for example the screensaver just goes on and on and nothing will stop it.

Any suggestions? Thanks any help.

You need to provide some understandable technical terms rather than
Xsomething, and information about the commands you issued and the
output of any errors or logs, how you got a screensaver started, etc.

A strange problem. Usually if the mouse and keyboard work in a virtual terminal as described they "just work" in the GUI environment.

Are you able to log on at the graphical logon screen?

Have you installed the VirtualBox Drivers for Linux guests? I know that there were some issues with V3.1 of teh guest additions if I recall correctly. Also If you have not installed the guest additions did you ensure that the mouse and keyboard were captured by the VM?

Know nothing whatever about Slack, this is my first try: get impression it is unfriendly, no problem. Installed slackware 13.1 32 bit in vbox on a Debian Lenny 5 64 bit host. Chose the light desktop XFCE and accepted all the installation defaults except something like 'GNU/emacs' which I take to be the text editor 'emacs', I normally use vim.

So everything is lovely. When I start vbox I get the black screen - take this to be normal. Log in as lugo with password and then: and then perhaps get a completely blank screen then <return> again and the desktop thing starts. Completely normal with the "Tips and Tricks" dialog box. And the menu bar at the bottom of the screen and some icons - like I imagine is supposed to occur.

But cannot interact with it. After a while screensaver graphics appear, a bit slow; but no mouse or key actions will stop it - just trying to illustrate the 'no communication' problem.

I went back to the black screen by 'rebooting', because there was no way of communicating with Slack itself. And installed vbox guest additions with no problem, but it still does not interact in XFCE mode.

Used Linux for a long time but am no expert, just an ordinary punter. Normally take the line of least resistance. I'd prefer XFCE but will install KDE if that's the simple way out. But would like it if you told me how: it's obvious slack prides itself in being unfriendly, and I genuinely respect that.

Don't know what logs to display. And it's a bit difficult to paste vbox stuff in here.

Try issuing the startx command as root

Exactly the same, nothing, mouse or keyboard, does anything in XFCE.

There is no graphical logon screen. It starts at the black screen, I log on there. Then with 'startx' the XFCE just starts with no logon screen. So is it supposed to automatically give a graphical logon - I thought it was its 'unfriendlyness' that made it start at the black screen?

Heh no, it isn't "unfriendliness" - it is the /etc/inittab file. You'll need to edit the "initdefault" line in that file, so that Slack starts up into runlevel 4 (the X GUI level) rather than its default of level 3 (multi-user, no X).

Open the file with an editor (as root) and you will see the "initdefault" line - it is the first non-commented line in the file, it's comment above it reads "Default Runlevel..."; change the 3 to a 4.

If you then want to switch runlevels, as root (from a VT) do:

I tried everything I could on that front. It will respond to host+home, and give the virtual box menu.

There is an I shaped pointer in the middle of the screen that will not move.

Did that, changed '3' to '4' and it stops - during the start up messages - at "Starting up X11 session manager" with a blinking cursor on the following line.

Perhaps I'd better just re-install and choose KDE?

Doesn't sound like reason to reinstall just yet.. KDE is the default anyhow, so it's probably already configured as the session manager (KDM) and DE (KDE) to start. Use `xwmconfig` as root to check.

Sounds to me like you have a video driver problem or other X problem. Have you checked out /var/log/Xorg.0.log since trying to start the GUI?

EDIT: And I see from catkin's post, and having re-read the top of the thread, that you don't have KDE installed; therefore, it would have been the default, if it were installed.. Sorry if this post misled you.

It is because of this possible error that Slackware does not go straight into level 4 out of the box. The recommended installation procedure is to test startx and, if it works, set runlevel 4 in initttab if desired.

The simplest way out of this situation is to reinstall, especially as this is a fresh installation. You can choose KDE instead of Xfce if you like but many people are running Xfce without problem. If you reinstall, unless you are short of disk space, you could follow the Slackware recommended procedure of installing everything (except KDE if you choose to try Xfce again).

For some reason X is unable to fully initialise. Is there anything unusual about the graphics defined for the VM? I am successfully using all the defaults except for increasing the virtual display RAM from 16 MB to 128. This gives the following line in ~c/.VirtualBox/Machines/<machine name>/<machine name>.xml

I may have misunderstood but I don't think lugoteehalt has a login prompt now. It could be fixed by booting another Linux and editing inittab ... but a) we don't know there is another bootable Linux available b) this installation may have glitched c) its a new installation so no investment in installations/configuration d) if a new installation behaves the same way the problem is less likely to be cause by a glitch.

Yes, I edited my above post - I thought KDE was installed, but it is not yet. Still though, XFCE should work, but I'm not sure at this point if it's merely a video card/driver/VM-video-hardware configuration issue, or if something went wrong during install. I don't see any evidence pointing at the latter.. Do you?

I also agree that a re-install (a full one) would at this stage in the game, be easy, and not a loss of anything but some time, so not a bad idea.