help, i'm a newbie

[Lowell Gilbert]

Please don't top-post, and a carriage return every 70 characters or so
of text wouldn't go amiss either.

dillon ross <casp_semper at yahoo.com> writes:

> that didn't seem to help much or i'm doing something terribly
> wrong. i did try to reconfigure x-server and went to xdesktop to
> choose default desktop (no other config opts.). when i run startx i
> get blank screen akin. typing afterstep at the command prompt gives
> the error msg. "can't open display.". i'm doing all of this on my
> laptop, with silicon motion graphics lynx em+ graphics card. is
> there a min on the video ram that kde or any such need to operate?

Your problem doesn't appear to be with KDE.  It's with getting X
running itself.  I've got (I think; it isn't booted at the moment) the
same kind of graphics controller in a laptop myself, and I configured
it with xf86cfg, if I recall correctly.  

Look at the logs that X leaves behind when it starts up -- and what it
prints to the console you started it from.  startx is the right way to
start it from the command line.