Synaptics problems while installing debian ETCH fvwm on a Thinkpad 600

Hi there !

My old TP600 used to run perfectly well on RedHat 7.2. with fvwm.
Persistent failures in trying to install wpa_supplicant on that system,
as well as on RedHat 7.3, convinced me to try installing Debian Etch.

This Etch system is now up and running... except that I have been so far
unable to run Xwindow on it.

My purpose is to get fvwm running, not Gnome or KDE ; however I have tried
the default install of GNOME with no real success (it was not as bad as
fvwm, but the result was still very poor)

fvwm installed, "startx" shows a screen of a meshed aspect, no icon or
text appear... no Xterm is available...

A check into the logfile (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) showed "synaptics" errors
in the end. It is supposed to concern mice... since Synaptics,
despites the fact that it had been properly installed and reckognised by
my system, did not properly managed the built in mouse of my TP600.

I am not sure that this is my only "X" problem, since, after the Synaptics
error messages, something says that an older generic software had
reckognised and managed said mouse... but it may have managed it in a way
that did not fit with the remaining of config.

Do you think that this may be responsible of my failure in getting X11
(fvwm) to work on my Debian Etch neomagic system ?

As a result, the X init process seems to start as it used to with fvwm on
RedHat 7.2 and 7.3. With the above mentioned parameters, the graphic
screen does fill all the available space. But I get stuck on a meshed
aspect, and no icons or text appear, which is exactly what happened at
start on my older system, except that it stayed that way only a few
seconds before changing to a normal non meshed clean and good aspect
with icons and text. On what I now get stuck, a left mouse clicking
displays an "internal menu" with "xterm", "debian menu". Debian menu and other
menus display screen boxes seem to work, "quit fvwm" works too, but
"xterm" does not open any
xterm window.

Thanks in advance for helping me configure my fvwm graphic environment on
that old laptop with Debian Etch

On 2008-10-21, Bernard <bernard@nospam.fr> wrote:
*SKIP*[color=blue]
> Thanks in advance for helping me configure my fvwm graphic environment
> on that old laptop with Debian Etch[/color]

I think, the standard way of getting help for Debian is asking in Debian
specific whatever (newsgroups, web-forums, mailing lists etc).

Meanwhile consider --

C<dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86> (I may be wrong here (with package
name) -- gone for testing and in stable I'd done that a long time (short
memory, you know)).

C<apt-get install xterm> (Did you go C<apt-get install x-window-system>
or C<apt-get install fvwm> way? IIRC, I'd gone C<apt-get install ude>,
and since that was for evaluation only (800x600, once used gimp) I
was quite happy without xterm at all (xine wasn't happy with my P-200,
though).

--
Torvalds' goal for Linux is very simple: World Domination