relatively urgent question (about X)

[Bill Moran]

Gary Kline wrote:
> 	For some months I've had increasing troubles with my 
> 	4.9/4.10 abruptly crashing.  This morning I found my
> 	workhorse server, tao, down and hung up while trying to
> 	fsck /usr.  I cleaned everything thoroughly and then
> 	started xdm.  The grey screen showed, the mouse was frozen;
> 	after 30 seconds, BOOM.  Another crash.  After yet 
> 	another round of fsck's, I tried startx.  To see what 
> 	errs might kill the X11 boot.  No: same blank grey screen,
> 	same frozen mouse,same OS crash.
> 
> 	I tried /stand/sysinstall to reconfigure X.  No luck.
> 	I'm now doing my next stable sup upgrade and am doing
> 	yet another buildworld  && buildkernel.
> 
> 	I doubt this will resolve the X Window snafu, tho.  So:::
> 	what x11/*XFree* ports do I have to fetch/build/install??
> 	((I'm assuming the reason for the crash was X-related,
> 	but this is only a first-SWAG.) Also, if anybody has had a 
> 	similar problem, please let me know.

I'm just speculating, but it sounds like it's your window manager
that's not starting, although X seems to actually be working.

You could easily test this by editing ~/.xinitrc to use twm (a
very simple wm) instead of what you're currently using.  If startx
works after that, then you don't need to fix X, you just need to fix
your wm.

In my experience, big, complex wms like Gnome and KDE tend to have
trouble off and on.  I've found that deleting everything from /tmp
will sometimes fix things.  Other times, I've been able to get things
going again by deleting the .gnome (and other, similar directories)
from my home directory.  Note that this second one blows away all your
Gnome settings.

HTH

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com