mirrorshades

Thanks for the continued suggestions -- will try them all out tonight. I had actually started with IceWM, but GNOME seems to perform "just about" as well. Good enough for me anyway. :)

Mouse pointer moves normally -- it's just stuck as the little watch. I only made the one change to /etc/inittab -- I commented out the original line and retyped it below, changing the 5 to a 3. Note that the problem also happens if I start in runlevel 5 and then issue an 'init 3' at the console, then log in as user and type 'startx'. Also don't think it's a video issue since: 1) no problems in runlevel 5; and 2) if I log into runlevel 3 as root and do a 'startx', X starts up normally -- so it seems to be something related to the user account in particular. (Though as I mentioned, I'm not an X guru by any stretch, so it may very well be.) I will post copies of the requested files later today. Thanks for the help so far. Just remembered: there doesn't seem to be a /var/log/X[anything] on the system (though the .xsession-errors did seem to have some stuff in it). Anywhere else I could look for system-level X logging?

I'm new-ish to the forums here (been lurking for about a month or so), but I figured I'd post my first problem to see if the great minds can help out. Here's the setup: - IBM thinkpad 380ed laptop - Pentium 166mhz, 80 megs ram - Mandrake 9.1, 2.4.x kernel (whatever the default with 9.1 is) - X version 3.3.6 (...I believe, not the 4.x version) Here's the problem: During the install, I configured the system to start in runlevel 5. GDM comes up properly, and I can sign in using either root or a user account I set up for myself. However, the laptop takes a long time to start up when the gdm is invoked; I modified /etc/inittab to start in runlevel 3, figuring I could just 'startx' if I wanted to (using GNOME in case it makes a difference). When I sign in as root, typing 'startx' begins X normally. However, when I sign in as my user account, it gets as far as a blue background and the "watch" mouse pointer, then just sits there (the hard disk eventually stops). It's not frozen -- <Ctl><Alt><Bksp> will terminate it normally. Based on the last few lines of output from 'startx' on the console screen, nothing immediately jumps out at me as causing an error message. I'm fairly comfortable with a linux command line, but troubleshooting X is a strange and intimidating beast for me. I seem to recall having a problem similar to this before that was corrected by modifying permissions on a file in my home directory. Not sure if this is the same, though. Anyone have any ideas that might get me going in the right direction? I'm sure there may be output/log files that may provide more useful info -- but as I mentioned, I'm not as familiar with X as I'd like to be.

You don't need an older version. Case in point: I recently purchased an IBM ThinkPad 380ED (circa 1997) that boasts a Pentium 166 MHz processor and 80 MB of RAM. I installed 9.1 on it and am quite pleased with its performance. Main complaint is that it takes about 5 minutes to boot up and start the GUI... but once everything is up and running it's not really bad at all. I tried both IceWM and GNOME, and GNOME is just about as fast as IceWM. One of the cool things about linux is that, unlike windows, a newer version doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go buy beefier hardware to use it.