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.