Really really weird

I had done lots of work on Puppy 218 last night, fixed bugs, thought it was all ready to go. I built what I thought was the final 218-alpha ISO file, booted it. X launched, then up came a black screen with only a mouse cursor... oh.

So, I went through a process of elimination, and eventually found something really odd. /usr/bin/xwin has this line to launch Xorg:

/usr/bin/xinit /root/.xinitrc -- -br -nolisten tcp > /tmp/xerrs.log 2>&1

When I took out that '-nolisten tcp', up came the desktop! I was puzzled, still am. I have a full hard drive install of 218 running the 2.6.18.8 kernel, on a desktop PC, no problem. This problem is occurring on my laptop. There was no problem with the 2.6.18.1 kernel, and I hardly made any configuration changes when running 'config' for the 2.6.18.8 kernel.

I ended up doing the most awful hack in the 'xwin' script:



Anyone got an idea what could cause this problem? By the way, the error log just says that X was waiting for a connection, then timed out.

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Comments

Maybe because X is client-server
Username: Sit Heel Speak
Consider the first two paragraphs, below, of http://www.microxwin.com/ Highlighting is my own, for emphasis. Perhaps future Puppies should use MicroXWin instead of X. "X Window Systems is a standard graphics framework for Unix/Linux desktops. There are large number of GUI toolkits and applications already written for X Windows Xlib API. X Windows is a [b]network oriented and client-server[/b] design with the X server responsible for all graphics operations. MicroXwin is binary compatible to the Xlib API. However it is neither client server nor network oriented. Graphics operations are implemented in the linux kernel via a kernel module. An open source Xlib library sends graphics commands to the kernel. There is no network overhead and no context switch from X client to X server. This makes our solution smaller and faster than traditional X Windows."

Re microxwin
Username: BarryK
"Yeah, I drool when I read their web pages, but it needs a binary-only kernel module, and as far as I can see they only have it available for certain distro, Slackware 12.2 included. Hmmm, I wonder if it could be forced to load on another kernel? [i]Kernel module x11.ko for some x86 distributions are available below. This is the only closed component but can be used freely for non-commercial purposes.[/i]

Tags: woof