So here I sit looking at potato running WindowMaker and scratching my head! But before I launch into the saga let me thank all who replied to my posts, especially Manuel Reiter and David Wright. Besides giving me some insights, their input kept me from scrubbing everything Debian off the disk in disgust.
Now for the story. Apologies that this is long, but it may encourage someone else who has had as much trouble as I have had getting X up and running. Others can hit delete at this point. TUESDAY ------- Evening commitments so only an hour or so to play. I followed the advice of Manuel and David I went over all of my X stuff with a fine tooth comb to make sure all the links were correct, the correct server was chosen, etc. Tried XF86Setup a couple of times, always picking "ATI Xpert 98" for the card and changing some of the monitor characteristics. Always failure - both when XF86Setup starts up the xserver or when I would type "startx". Occasionally a particular combo would get past the "Done" of XF86Setup without failing and give me the "Congratulations you've got a running XServer" page, but after I saved the configuration file and tried "startx" manually it would fail. Gave up for the night. WEDNESDAY --------- I bought the third addition of "Running Linux" published by O'Reilly since it had a nice chapter on installing X. While I was in the Barnes and Noble bookstore the earthquake hit (I live east of Seattle). Got home, no damage, just a few vases tipped over. Whew! Again evening commitments so only a couple of hours. Play some more, this time tweaking parameters with XF86Setup and xf86config. Again, I would get the occasional combo that would get to the "you have a running X server" page but a manual "startx" would fail. So gave it up for the night. THURSDAY -------- During the day I downloaded a bunch of info from www.xfree86.org. I also chucked the "no-name" monitor that I was using. It had a token brand name of "Icon", but I couldn't find *any* info for it whatsoever after doing a search on the web. It was replacing by an 15 inch AOpen F50L LCD display. I had been waiting for a reason to try one of these and having a monitor *with* specifications would help in my current situation. Had to work late though, so once again only a couple of hours to play. Armed with "Running LINUX", the xfree86 HOW-TOs and the new monitor specs I started playing again. I hand crafted an XF86Config file from what I had gleaned from the info on the video adapter and the monitor specs. Always, "startx" would fail. When I tried "startx -probeonly" it didn't seem to give me much info that was truly useful. I booted into my Mandrake installation at runlevel 2 to so that I could capture the printout from "X -probeonly" since that installation was running XF86Free 4 just fine. The printout said that the card had an internal RAMDAC and a programmable clock. Back to potato. I tried XF86Setup again, but this time picked "ATI mach64 internal RAMDAC" and I picked the monitor type that matched the AOpen specs. The Xserver started and I hit he "Save XF86Config" button. Manually using "startx" would always fail. This time I repeated the sequence a few times and found that it was indeed repeatable! So I felt that I was at least getting *somewhere*. Gave up for the night at this point. FRIDAY ------ By this time I knew that I had better spend the evening with my wife. She had been gently teasing me about how much time I was spending with "Debbie-Ann" and I didn't want it to escalate! However my wife had to run a quick errand so I thought that I would putter around in the computer room. I read some mail and then decided to quickly boot to Mandrake and add the Debian partition to LILO. Booting from the floppy was just *too* painful and I had been avoiding reboots to Debian because of that. My wife came home just as I gotten a good config file generated and successfully used it to boot to Mandrake. We decided to practice our recorders, but just before leaving the computer I started LILO booting to Debian as a test. I could see that it has successfully started and left the room. Well, we practiced our recorders and decided it was time to call it a night. I went over to the Linux computer to shut it down. Lo and behold!!!! It was sitting there at the GUI login prompt. I was stunned but decided that any further activity would have to wait until the morning. SATURDAY -------- I was really perplexed about why it was working but I didn't want to look a gift-horse in the mouth so logged in as root and started to learn a little bit about WindowMaker. Of course the first thing I did was to open up terminal window and copy XF86Config to XF86Config.works"!! ;-) That's where things stand at the moment. Today I need to get the network up and play with the sound card as well. Then I will try GNOME. ----- Lessons and a Question ----- LESSON 1: Be willing to spend a little money on a good reference such as "Running LINUX" and get the latest edition so that it will be current with your distro. Also print out any HOW-TOs that relate to your task. In this case there was some good info from www.fx86free.org. Most of it may not apply directly to your case, but it usually gives you some valuable insights. This info armed with help from this reflector will go a long way. LESSON 2: Try to get as much info as you can about your video card and monitor. While XF86Setup and fx86config may do a good job in most cases they are not perfect. Every reference that I ended up reading brought home this point. LESSON 3: Make sure that you can reboot quickly and efficiently so that you don't put it off like I did. Had I done reboots after getting a configuration that allowed the Xserver to start from XF86Setup I might have had a working system earlier! QUESTION 1: This is directly related to LESSON 3 and is aimed at the gurus who monitor this reflector. Why does typing "startx" fail even though XF86Setup successfully started the X server? I had several instances of getting some combo of card and monitor choice where this was the scenario. It could have avoided a lot of thrashing. Again, thanks to all who fed me info and encouragement. I'm sure I'll have more questions, but at least things are working at this point. Cheers, -rick
