when i start kde or gnome in slackware 10 my screen goes blank. I kind of suspect that it could be a resolution or refresh rate issue, but im not sure. does anyone have some advice? my monitor is a viewsonic capable of up to 1600x1200 and 60-85hz. my gfx card is a geforce fx 5600. i dont know if either of those components could be the cause of this snag. thanks.

Its not KDE or GNOME at fault. Its X.

Considering you're clearly at a CLI anyway, "xf86config" (Slack still uses Xfree, right?), and set your card/monitor up right. Then you'll be ready to go with KDE etc

i configured everything to the best of my knowledge, but now the screen flickers of then goes back to the command line. i didnt have any problems with the default settings on my laptop... could it be anything else?

Basically, no. Its X. You may be using a revision too old to have support for your card, you could try using the VESA generic driver though.

ill give it a shot, thanks for all your help myob

Look in /var/log/ for X logs. They might look like Xfree86.log. See the end of the file for what happened last.

When the screen goes to black, are you getting an error of any kind? Maybe a "No screens found" or similar to that?

You might want to try and install the nVidia Linux Drivers, as the default ones may not work with your card, which could explain why it goes black.

Can you start any other X desktop? or is it just KDE?

No x desktops are working. with the default settings the screen goes blank, period. there are no error messages, beeps, or big yellow flags popping out of my drive bays... lol. if only... after i run the configuration for x i do get an error, but it's for my mouse... strange indeed... thanks for your help all.

p.s. I'm gonna try those drivers too... just have to wait for my new mobo... see chipset category: "no boot"


I just can't seem to have enough problems at once...

Well, you could try putting

exec xterm

to ~/.xinitrc instead of exec startkde, to see if it's a KDE problem.

That should launch a plain X session with only a terminal screen.