geforce4 & RH 7.0 - No Desktop

I just installed RH 7.0 on my new Pentium 4 w/Intel 850 chipset. I downloaded the NVidia drivers from the Web site and successfully installed them using RPM. Now, when I type "startx" I get a real funky screen with three terminal windows and a small clock. I can't start GNOME or KDE.

Red Hat Tech Support is mystified. None of them has ever seen or heard of the three-window screen I am getting. I can shift the resolution between 1024x768 and 800x600, but I can't run GNOME, which I need.

Red hat thinks it is an NVidia problem. At this point, I have no idea what to do next. Can any one help? I have attached my XFree86.0.log file.



clemmons78

[Klaus-P]

Is the old fvwm windowmanager (i guess it is or it is fvwm2) not funny with its clock and the three
terminal windows? This is X under Linux pure classics.

Well, a startx <W-manager of your choice>
or an entry in your home .bashrc (if you are running the bash)
export WINDOWMANAGER=/usr/X11R6/bin/kde (resp. export WINDOWMANAGER=/path/to/the/windowmangerprogram)
should help. The manager has to be properly installed on your computer. KDE, fvwm2, fvwm95, etc,...

first of all check what "export" reports about WINDOWMANAGER= ?????.

[bwkaz]

Hey! That "funky three-window and a clock" you speak of happens to be my window manager of choice! Careful!

It's twm. I've never tried that "export WINDOWMANAGER" way of changing things, but if you create a file name .xinitrc (note the leading period) in your home directory, that contains the single line exec startkde, you'll get KDE when you startx. If you make the file contain exec gnome-session, you'll get Gnome.

To create the file, do an echo "exec gnome-session" >~/.xinitrc, replacing gnome-session with startkde or whatever, if you want. Thereafter, when you startx, you should get your desktop of choice.

The solution offered by bwkaz looked easier, so I tried it first. It worked great! I inserted both lines in the ".xinitrc" file, and I use an editor to "rem out" the line I don't want. It is somewhat clumsy, but it works.

My thanks to both of you, Klaus-P and bwkaz, for helping to get me out of this quagmire. My only question at this point is: Why didn't Red Hat Technical Support know this? I dealt with three different technicians over the course of about five days.

Thanks, again!

clemmons78

[Klaus-P]

Perhaps they are young computer science students. We all are or were young
and don't know about all things of history. Have 'mercy' ;-)

[bwkaz]

I wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about if I hadn't ever seen twm (although twm by itself doesn't look like 3 xterms and an xclock, that's probably actually the way X set its /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc file up by default) for myself. As it is, when I built my LFS system the first time, I tried to start up X right after installing it (forgetting about things like a window manager), and to my surprise, it actually worked. Well, sort of... it's hard to get used to, but the speed is nice. As is the sloppy focus (which, I know, you can enable in other WMs/DEs, but it isn't the default).