hello everybody!
I'm having a pretty hard time making slackware 13.37 work on a very old toshiba satellite 1800-400 (celeron 800 mhz, ram 375 mb, agp with 8mb). It installs flawlessly, and I can actually log in on the command line, but startx gives me only a still, black screen.
Can you give me some advice?
Thank you very much!

Yes, if you give us some information. Odds on it's a graphics problem
run these as root & pastebin the output. You may need a graphics driver or firmware.

Post the pastebin link here.

Which GUI do you have installed? 8Mb is a very small amount of memory for a video card now days, you'll probably need to go very lightweight in GUI aspects, WMII is a good window manager very lightweight and might work for you, but still you might want to go even lighter on that and everything else on your GUI will have to follow the same philosophy. I would not even use an login manager, or maybe Slim if things don't go too slow. What about web browser? Dillo probably is the best choice here. Maybe not using it with X might be the best option, processor and RAM are enough for a home server for small tasks.
What do you want to use that old computer for?

Regards

8MB video RAM is more than enough for a simple WM, like Fluxbox if you don't use higher resolutions, which is unlikely on an old laptop. But you are right on the browser, with 375MB Firefox will not be much fun.

Anyways, the important thing is to get it working at all and without information on the videochip this is impossible. A quick Google search revealed that this laptop uses a Trident videochip, which normally should run out of the box.

I plan to use this laptop as a sort of "advanced typewriter", and for occasional websurfing. Very basic things anyway. About the window manager, I plan to use Lxde, as I believe it's quite lightweight.

LXDE should be fine for that laptop. Do you have it already installed or are you at this time going with one of the installed WMs?
Also, we still need the information asked by business_kid to help you.

the command you gave me resulted in the very same black screen I get after startx. lspci alone won't run. (bizarre).
p.s. maybe important info: I actually didn't install vanilla slackware, I installed salix lxde, as I thought it was a quicker way to get lxde.

Yes, that would happen. Ctrl_Alt_Backspace to get out.
Now you will have a file some_file(or whatever you called it) and THAT'S what we all want to see. Have you links or lynx installed? can you get it online or even read the first bit with less and tell us what the video is. Even copy(cp) it to a usb key and post it from another box.

eventually I solved it. I created, and then edited the xorg.conf file, adding some lines, like these http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/howt...splay_problems.
I want to thank you all anyway

Glad you're sorted. When you look back over this thread, you will realise you gave us no information with which to help you. It's good you got to the bottom of an issue. If you want forums to work for you, you should try the advice given and reply on that, even if things are not working.