i recently decided to try out arch linux 0.6. so far, i'm very impressed. however, i'm experiencing some problems and i am unable to find the solution in the forums.

after getting the system up, i installed fluxbox with "pacman -S fluxbox". it downloaded and installed fluxbox along with xorg and other dependencies with no problem. i edited .xinitrc to read "exec fluxbox".

here's where the problem is: if i don't create an xorg.conf file with "xorgconfig", i can get "startx" to start up fluxbox fine (except the resolution and everything is messed up, of course). if i run "xorgconfig" as root, then try "startx", i just get a blank screen, and nothing works (i can't ctrl+alt+backspace, ctrl+alt+F1, or even ctrl+alt+del).

i know i've setup xorg.conf correctly because i've done "xorgconfig" on other distros before and it's worked just fine. i see xorg.conf in /etc/X11/ as well. so now what?

edit: here are some similar threads in the arch forums. they're unresolved so it's really no help. but these people are having the same problem:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=6994
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=7198

it is most likely a driver problem. when i choose not to look at the card database in xorgconfig i at least get a "failed to initialize core devices" instead of a complete system crash.

bear with me, as this is the first time i've had to setup x from scratch on a linux system...

try "echo fluxbox > .xinitrc" i dont think you need the exec command there. i don't know how the freebsd version of Xorg is different from the Gentoo version, if at all, so that may be something to try

did you actually use a text editor or `less` to view the contents of Xorg.conf? if not do so, cause if it is full of garbage we have an obvious problem :-D

also try other X configuration utils or even manually configuring the file.

one I used a long time ago (5 years?) was xf86config it prompted you for data and generated the file, since that day I have simply modified the same file as needed and it has worked great through several vid card/driver changes and even complete hardware changes, though I have needed to adjust it accordingly.. I never trusted the GUI utils....

"exec fluxbox" is no different than "fluxbox"

i'm using arch, not freebsd, like i said above. and you're right, Xorg shouldn't differ between OSes, except by version number perhaps.

anyways, i got a different result using "xorgcfg -textmode" - now i get "No core pointer." seems there's no /dev/mouse, and the xorg.conf tries to point to a /dev/mouse. so maybe it's not a video card problem after all, since i'm pretty sure i'm using the right video driver. i have an nvidia geforce fx 5200 and i've tried "vesa" and "nv" for drivers, and i've also selected "nvidia geforce fx 5200" in the card database.

anyways, if it's not the video card, i can't figure out the mouse. i'm using a regular 5 button ps/2 optical, and i've tried "auto", "ps/2", "imps/2", and "explorerps/2" with still no luck. do i somehow have to make a /dev/mouse or something?

i have tried "xorgconfig", "xorgcfg -textmode", and manually editing parts of the xorg.conf file that both of those programs generate.

nm, problem solved...

all i had to do was tell xorg the mouse is located at /dev/input/mice, not /dev/mouse

wow, that was easy. thanks for the help anyways.

Did you try running 'Xorg -config' (I think that was the switch you wanted ..might be -configure). It (from what I read) attempts an autoconfigure for Xorg....after running it there's output onscreen which lists an xterm command allowing you to test the new .conf

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