You should get a gray screen of little overlapping Xs (depending on the resolution you're running at, you may or may not be able to make out the Xs) This is the default X Window screen, and should be replaced after a short while by a blue-green screen and then a start bar at the bottom of the screen. If the color changes to a blue-green but no start bar appears, see if the bar is "off" the screen. X supports virtual desktops that are larger than what you can actually see on the screen. Moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen might show movement and a gray start bar at the bottom.

Common Problems and Their Solutions

This section covers most of the common problems you'll experience when starting X Window, and how to solve them.

Wait for 30 seconds or so. On a 486/66 or slower machine X Window can take a while to start. For some video cards, the driver may be having problems using it properly. Type Control-Alt-Backspace and re-run Xconfigurator.

This is a worst-case scenario. You need to reboot the machine and let the machine check the disk drives for errors. The Linux filesystem keeps track of what parts are allocated and when a machine is shut down in a bad state, it needs to run the fsck command to fix these items. Most times the start-up scripts can handle this without user intervention.

In the case of very large overlapping Xs, the X server has probably gone into 320¥200 mode versus 640¥480. This problem occurs when the video card is not detected correctly by the server. Exit out of X either with the hot keys Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or cleanly via the Start
button at the bottom of the screen. Check the file startx.out by using the command less startx.out and seeing if any errors that might help set up matters correctly were listed. Sometimes the problem is that you may need to select a different RAMDAC or some other option for that card.

If the mouse doesn't respond correctly to user input, it can be due to several problems. The first is that the pointer section of the file was misconfigured by mouseconfig and Xconfigurator. Xconfigurator gets the values for the mouse from the settings that are set by the mouseconfig program. You should check the settings in the file /etc/sysconfig/mouse or via the mouseconfig

program and then either rerun Xconfigurator or edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config file. The section of the file should look something like the following:

Section "Pointer"

    Protocol    "PS/2"

    Device      "/dev/mouse"

EndSection

The protocol says which type of mouse X should try to use and the device says which port it should look at. Further information on the types of mice supported can be found by running the command man XF86Config.

Another common reason for the mouse to fail is that the mouse is requiring special initializations or is conflicting with another program (usually gpm, which is a text mouse control program). In the case of possible conflicts, you should try stopping the gpm program (/etc/rc.d/init.d/gpm stop) and then try starting X again. If this solves the problem, you may find that you want to disable gpm altogether. To do this, run the ntsysv command and toggle gpm off.

For mice that need special configuration options the problem can sometimes be avoided by treating the mouse as a modem and using a serial program to turn it on. In these cases, changing mice can often be simpler.

Having Your Machine Always Start in X Window

If you always want your machine to start the X Window manager so you don't have to type startx when you log in, you only have to edit one file.

Log in as root and edit the /etc/inittab file. This file is used by init to start various utilities. Changing the line beginning with id enables X to always start on boot.

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:

#   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)

#   1 - Single user mode

#   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)

#   3 - Full multiuser mode

#   4 - unused

#   5 - X11

#   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)

#

id:5:initdefault:

The default run level of a Linux box is 3. Changing the number to 5, as it is in the preceding example, starts the X Window system, using the xdm program to manage logins.