This install is on a Dell 5150 laptop, which has made things a little difficult. I installed Gentoo via stage 2. Luckily, some very smart people on IRC were able to help me with things such as making this system bootable and installing xorg-x11. Now, I have installed XFCE and am actually running it right now. The only way I can get x to start is by deleting the xorg.conf file. The one that is created automatically fails to load x. Clearly, I'm doing something wrong. Anyhow, here's what happens when I startx:

Using vt 7
Symbol drmGetClient from module /usr/lib/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.0 is unresolved

below that is a complaint about synaptics touch pad (which is less important--i can remove it for the time being because I have a USB mouse). I actually installed a synaptics package (emerge synaptics).

So, now you want to see my xorg.conf file (many of the commented lines have been clipped so that the forum would accept the post:

EDIT: Screen hog <xorg.conf file removed>

System: Dell Inspiron 5150 Laptop
UXGA 15" display
Radeon 9000 32MB
synaptics touchpad
M$ optical mouse (2 buttons+scrollwheel/button)

I'm really new to linux, so please be specific. I can also post any files you want to look at (I believe x has a log file somewhere).

Thanks

The unresolved symbol error would suggest some driver/module incompatibility or some object file being missing.

In addition to the xorg.conf file you could post your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file from after X has failed to start.

ok, I seem to have this half way ironed out. I manually made an xorg.conf file based on examples people have posted on the web. Everything appears to be working in my desktop environment now using this file. It appears to be 1600x1200x24bpp, which is the most important part. In fact, everything appears to be working, including my scroll wheel.

But, I want to be positive. Is there a way for me to check for errors (since entering x eliminates my ability to see errors...

I'm looking through the log file you mentioned. These are the things that stand out:

(WW) fglrx(0) board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported
.
.
.
(WW) fglrx(0): could not detect XFree86 version (query_status=-3)
(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! *
(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available *
(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *
.
.
.
(WW) fglrx(0): Option "AGPMode" is not used

So, these are the only Warning I see in the log file. There are no EE or NI messages, which is probably good. I wonder if I should *** something like this:

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

to get rid of some of the errors or add something like this under Section "Module":

Load "dri"

Like I said, I'm completely new to linux, so I could have installed something incorrectly or incompletely.

Thanks.

So, I've definately learned more about linux in the past week than I ever cared to. One of my main problems was that the fglrx driver that I installed was not working properly. This was due to the way I had the kernel configured. I had AGPGART and intel-agp directly compiled in the kernel. For some reason, this was not working, so I compiled them as modules and had them autoload at startup. After that, the fglrx drivers worked ok. the one problem that I have since run into is that with 3d acceleration enabled, flash web pages cause a hard lockup that I need to use my power button to restart with. I'm not planning on playing games with this, so I just disabled 3d acceleration in my xorg.conf file and everything is fine. I still have 2d acceleration required for my xvid collection.

One thing that I have noticed about Linux is that the fonts on some web pages don't look as nice as they do using IE in windows (i.e. the font on techspot forums doesn't look as nice as the gentoo forums--it looks small and blocky). Any recommendations on that?