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From: Nik Clayton <Nik.Clayton@brunel.ac.uk>
Message-Id: <10905.9507130905@molnir.brunel.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: X Problem
To: steinber@SLINKY.CS.NYU.EDU (Joseph Steinberg)
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 10:05:21 +0100 (BST)
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950712214100.6823D-100000@slinky.cs.nyu.edu> from "Joseph Steinberg" at Jul 12, 95 09:43:28 pm
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> all I get is a grey (i.e., black and white display) screen that goes way
> off my monitor, with a mouse prompt 'X', and a frozen system (well, sort
> of frozen, -- the mouse moves the mouse pointer, but that is all I can
> do. I have to hit the 'RESET' key and reboot -- and pray the the
> filesystem is in order -- to do anything).

This sounds like two problems. 

The first is your monitor positioning. That's easy to fix. Go into
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and edit XF86Config (make sure you don't have a copy
of this file in /etc, the X system will look for it in there first, and
ignore any changes you make to the copy in /usr/X11...).

Your looking for the "Modeline" entry for whichever resolution your
using. You need to tweak a couple of parameters to shift the picture
back into place. The process is documented in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/VideoModes.doc, so I won't duplicate it here.

The second sounds like bits of your window system (the window manager
specifically) aren't starting up properly. Try doing 

    startx >& /tmp/startx.error

which will redirect any error messages to the file /tmp/startx.error,
which you can then inspect and try and spot some likely candidates for
problems.

Rather than turning your machine off if X hangs, try doing
<CTRL><ALT><BACKSPACE>, which should kill the X server and return you to
the prompt.

N
=-[Opinion, n: See the above text for an example]=-=[Kibo #: e]-[RYRYRY]=-=
=-[The Silly Sod Society: To perfect and to swerve]=-[beable]-=[TP U BG]=-=
Down with categorical imperative!