loading the GUI in debian

[pataphysician]

i'm apologizing in advance for asking such a stupid question. i've just installed debian on an old pII, which i plan(ned?) on using to try out/learn how various distributions before commiting to one and installing it on my actual box. now, with my utter cluelessness disclaimed:

my first attempt here is with debian. i installed it using a boot.iso (woody?), and was under the impression that everything went ok. when it came time to install packages, i left everything pretty much as is, installing the suggested packages and also choosing to include enlightenment and window maker.

so now, i login and type startx. what i get is:

--------
xauth: creating new authority file /mike/.Xauthority
xauth: creating new authority file /mike/.Xauthority

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc: /usr/bin/X11/X: No such file or directory
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc: exec: /usr/bin/X11/X: cannot execute: No such file or directory
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.
--------

and i'm back at the command prompt.

again, i have no working knowledge of linux at all, and have no idea how to fix this. any non-flame advice would be appreciated. if it's any consolation, i've ordered a ton of books and plan on working with this for quite awhile before fully abandoning windows.

[fancypiper]

Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/)
The Linux XFree86 HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-HOWTO/)
Common x configuring tools:
Redhat - setup utility leads to several config tools
Debian - dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
You may have these tools:
XF86Setup
XFree86 -configure
Xconfigurator
xf86cfg
xf86config
xconf

[Dun'kalis]

Damn...beat me to it.

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 is really good. It fixed my X more than once.

[fancypiper]

Originally posted by Dun'kalis
Damn...beat me to it.I plagarized a post of yours :D

I have the CDs for Debian and I have got to find the time to install and try it out.

It just rained and my pipes sound so sweet though......

[pataphysician]

thanks for the swift replies. unfortunately, when i logged in as root and tried dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86, i was told that xfree86 wasn't installed. i tried to follow the install instructions from the x86 howto link, hoping to possibly learn something along the way; but i'm afraid i got in a little over my head. since i had just installed debian, i figured i may as well go ahead and just re-install it. this time, i'm just going to chose the basic end-user taskel package groups, and not even touch dselect. i think that last time, when i was trying to customize things with dselect, i de-selected (hey!) some core component of X. oops.

does everyone bumble around this blindly when they first start out, or is it just me?

[fancypiper]

I stumbled around in Windows a long time until I started stumbling around in Linux. :D

Won't apt-get install kde or something like that drag x along and install it? That's supposed to be one of the strong points of Debian.

[z0mbix]

send us the output of:

dpkg -l | grep x

Mine has the following that are relevant:

ii xbase-clients 4.1.0-17 miscellaneous X clients
ii xfonts-100dpi 4.1.0-17 100 dpi fonts for X
ii xfonts-75dpi 4.1.0-17 75 dpi fonts for X
ii xfonts-base 4.1.0-17 standard fonts for X
ii xfonts-scalabl 4.1.0-17 scalable fonts for X
ii xfree86-common 4.1.0-17 X Window System (XFree86) infrastructure
ii xfs 4.1.0-17 X font server
ii xfstt 1.3-1 TrueType Font Server for X11
ii xlib6g 4.1.0-17 pseudopackage providing X libraries
ii xlibmesa3 4.1.0-17 XFree86 version of Mesa 3D graphics library
ii xlibs 4.1.0-17 X Window System client libraries
ii xserver-common 4.1.0-17 files and utilities common to all X servers
ii xserver-xfree86 4.1.0-17 the XFree86 X server
ii xutils 4.1.0-17 X Window System utility programs


you'll need to apt-get these, admittadly not all are required but if you:

apt-get install xserver-common xserver-xfree86 xfonts-base xfs

the other dependencies will be installed aswell.

[rustskull]

(pertinent)
Not exactly a newbie, but I think everyone's a newbie when they hit an area out of their expertise. I had no problem with deb v3.0r0 (1st stable woody rel).

(not so pertinent)
I dl all 7 cd @ work, B&B them, and went for it. I killed some funny processes during my attempts at wine config and inadvertently caused my default x stuff to go haywire. Figured it might be quicker to start from scratch than to unfub what I done, so I decided to try a net install, using only the first deb disc and my broadband connection. I found out the default configs (or consequences) for choosing either gdm or xdm are vastly different...I chose gdm the first time, to see how it worked. I had picked xdm on my potato system here at work, because at least I knew of xdm (was still new to deb/linux) and didn't know how gdm would behave (read of some mouse issues at the time...). I then picked xdm the second time I did the net install (which btw worked excellently, debian is pretty awesome) and received a rude surprise...the cool chooser that gdm threw up before, was now gone...

I did like the implementation in potato (ended up with wmaker, which seemed cooler than the other options) and I was able to choose other desktops on the fly (anything on the menu could be invoked without leaving the current session), still figuring out everything for sawfish (which is now the default install, along with kde). xdm option just brings up kde by default, which is confusing...and I had to start it manually, too.

There are masses of reading on this subject, I'm still trying to nail down where a concise guide is to all the config files, what they do, and how to make em work. I'm really more interested in other applications of linux, but it seems that if you want to work in anything but terminal mode, you have to work something out. I don't want necessarily all the point n click features, I just want some thing stable and predictable, easily maintained. Very basic stuff.

What I'm observing, even in just the past 8 months I've really been into all this, is that go with anything that is preceded by a "g" to really make it work well. It may be less mature, but debian has a great system of releasing stable distros (well usually more stable than most, potato was rock solid once in and I've never heard of any of the horror stories that you get with some other more well known distros), updating regularly, and an awesome scheme for updating your distribution...and I've seen the gnome community come great strides and be very attentive towards critical issues...I think that if this continues that it will be the best way to go, because it runs completely openly. I think that this is also why it has improved so rapidly and consistently. Combined with debians update mechanism, anything you have set up on it will be easily maintainable, come bugfix time.

The free route also ensures that what standards there are and will be are inherent on your system, so any programs released under free licenses should interoperate cleaner. Combined with debians philosophical and technical policies, this improves even more.

So...maybe you just need to go with gdm, because it soulnds like what you got was a default xdm install...because I had to start mine manually too when that was selected. gdm worked just great, and I know when I get to looking up the configurations of these display managers, I will likely find that gdm has the most sensible and expeditious configurability.

You can't beat open source for these aspects, for a number of reasons, which most of us know at least some of, and I'm not going to go into here...because I've already burned up the forum's space. Suffice to say that given the option, most people aren't intentionally going to make things *harder* on themselves.

-rust