Blank screen with X cursor

[tryangle]

Hi,

My initial problem was that the screen could not be found when I installed Psyche a few months ago. So, I installed the 4.3.0 version of xfree86 because my SiS video card was not supported in 4.2.0 that came with the RH8 distro. Then I had no errors when I went into X. But all I got was a blank screen with a nice big X cursor I could move around. I tried several things to no avail... I heard that RH9 was coming out soon so I waited, hoping that when I installed it, my problem would somehow be resolved. But I got the same thing... No errors and a nice big X cursor I can move around the screen. I had gotten some info about writing an .xinitrc file to /home/username/.xinitrc with exec gnome-session or start kde in it, so I did that too. But I still get nothing that resembles a gui. I'm booting to runlevel 3 and everything seems to work fine at the console.

Any ideas? :(
Thanks in advance for any help on this.

[mdwatts]

So you are just using 'startx' at runlevel 3?

Have a look at your startx script to see if it is set to start a desktop environment.

You could try

startkde

instead of startx. I'm not sure about Gnome.

Or try

kdm

[tryangle]

Actually I'm using <shift>x<enter> at runlevel 3 but AFAIK it does the same thing as startx<enter>

I'll try those other suggestions you mentioned though... thanks mdwatts

[tryangle]

I was able to bring up the kde login manager and it seems to be working fine... Thank you mdwatts. Is there a way to be able to execute kdm without being logged in as root?

As I mentioned before, I don't get any error messages when I execute X but when I tried startkde I got the following error message which indicates that it could not connect to X:

xsetroot: unable to open display ''
xrdb: Can't open display ''
xset: unable to open display ""
startkde: Starting up...
ksplash: cannot connect to X server
kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set.
Warning: connect() failed: :No such file or directory
ksmserver: cannot connect to X server
startkde: Shutting down...
Warning: connect() failed: :No such file or directory
Error: Can't contact kdeinit!
startkde: Running shutdown scripts...
startkde: Done.

What could I configure to correct this?

Thanks in advance

[mdwatts]

Something in the startx or startkde scripts is not setup correctly for starting KDE/KDM.

Have a look through those scripts (read the comments) and see what you can find.

Mine is /opt/kde3/bin/startkde and /usr/X11R6/bin/startx.

[DMR]

Also, other settings to look at are in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file.

[Hayl]

<moved to software>