... and I don't know how to get out of X to fix it! Need the keyboard shortcut to get out of Xfce, or X, or whatever it is that is the GUI.

Thanks

P.S. Any help on fixing the mouse would be nice, but I understand that is hardware issue.

P.S.S. I am using Slack 11 (don't know which Xfce or X, but it's the default ones for this version), Couldn't get my laptop to burn a usable Slack 12 disc(s). The laptop has Windows on it that's how I am on here. When my desktop is working, I'll be putting Slack 12 on my laptop. (with purchased discs)

ctrl+alt+backspace will exit you out of X to the command line. if it respawns you can use ctrl+alt+F2 (or F3, F4, etc.) to go to the console, and get back into X usually with alt+F7. you can also change your runlevel in /etc/inittab so you can boot directly to the command line and not even go into X.

Thank you, I had tried ctrl+alt+esc and ctrl+alt+del, I would have never guessed back space.

Now to fix the mouse.

I fixed mouse and broke X using xorgconfig I found in Slack essentials online version. what a hoot!!

I FIXED IT!!! ok that's a lie. xorgsetup fixed it. still it's working enough to use the gui. Some think this is bad I say it is very good indeed.

It's broke again and this time nothing is bringing it back

"it's broke" doesn't really tell us much. you'll have to provide more detail, tell us what's wrong exactly, any error messages, your xorg.conf file, etc.

Basically once you have a working xorg.conf, take a backup of it (cp /etc/X11/xorg.{conf,conf.bak}) and if you need to make changes, just open xorg.conf with a text editor (vim, nano, pico, joe, gedit, kate, ...) and make the changes there. If you don't need the commented lines, remove them (maybe easiest by grepping the file so that lines starting with # are left out, then put the output back to xorg.conf) and you'll get a lot shorter (and thus more readable) file. A basic xorg.conf without extra/unneeded stuff is fairly short.

I had a vertically moving mouse with Slackware 11 on one machine (well, actually it moved upwards when clicking a button) and I couldn't fix it by any means (tried all protocols and a lot of settings, nothing did anything useful in addition to X not starting) with Slackware, so I just changed the OS for that machine. Hopefully your problem is easier. I guess fixing the movement is just about figuring out the right protocol to use (IMPS/2 for example), but in my case none of the protocols except for one worked, and that protocol didn't like the mouse then..

But shorten the xorg.conf file to make it easy to edit it, and edit it directly; the various configuration scripts are nice when you start off nothing, but they mainly just produce a huge file that you'll eventually have to edit manually anyway.

Thanx, I actually like seeing the commented lines, so I can learn what is going on. I wish I had that tip about copying a file. I haven't gotten to the point in the book where it teaches you the cp command. (yet)

Also, if the default mouse driver is not working, you see if the evdev driver will work instead.