"startx" won't work

**tr_wright1** · 04-18-2004

today i have spent (more like wasted) some time installing a version of redhat (5.1) onto my sharp pc8700 laptop, witch has a i486 processor with 12mb of ram.
The laptop has no cdrom drive and the 800mb hdd won't hold installation and cd 1 at same time, so that kills off installing from a hdd.
my only option was to migrate my laptop's hdd to a desktop with a cdrom drive.
all worked fine, install etc... it even booted without trouble.
i knew i would have to reconfigure X for the laptop's video card (a western digital card with a wd90c24a chip), even after reconfiguring X, it still tryed to user the old s3 server
any help would be much appreciated, i would also like to use my pcmcia mem cards with linux, but they are not seen, does this daemon start with X or something?
if not how do i get them to work?
again help would be much appreciated.

**bpark** · 04-19-2004

Well, do you really want to install X on such old hardware? Will it even run on 12MB?

**Hellmasker** · 04-19-2004

it has a WD graphics chip???

i didnt knwo they made such things, which doesnt mean there is no driver for it but it probably means it wont be installed by default.

you need to chaneg the driver name is XF86Config

**tr_wright1** · 04-19-2004

to answer your questions, i have looked on western digital's site and found nothing, i have also looked on other driver sites and also found nothing.
by the way i took account of small ram size by giving it a 64mb swap.
it should run x because it ran M$' win 95 no prob.

**bpark** · 04-19-2004

Upgrading to 64MB is probably a better idea. I'm still not sure how fast X can run but nontheless, 32MB is .. just no good.

WD graphics chip ... I too am surprised that they even have such things. Unless you can find a driver for that, my guess would be that you won't be able to use X on that computer.

**tr_wright1** · 04-19-2004

i found out that x will run, i typed xdm at the command line and x started ok. i just need to know how to get it to use the server i installed manualy.
i also tryed running the server i installed and it runs fine.

**bpark** · 04-20-2004

Can you check for a line like

Code:

# The default runlevel.
id&#58;2&#58;initdefault&#58;

inside your /etc/inittab? Also, what distro are you running?

**tr_wright1** · 04-20-2004

i am running redhat 5.1 on the system, as for that line, it reads id:3:initdefault:

**bpark** · 04-20-2004

Change the 3 to a 5. You should now boot into xdm everytime.

**tr_wright1** · 04-21-2004

i have tryed init 5 and x won't load it continues to try to use the S3V server

and the res is too big, it HUGE!!!!! the taskbar is about 1.5cm tall how do i adjust the res?

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