Ohhhhh yes I have completed X window install, all went well. So I do startx as stipulated in the book, I get the 3 windows, the clock. But the keyboard and mouse are dead. I unplugged them and tried other ports, no success. :-|

I think I know, can't check at the moment, but has to do with installing xf86 drivers for keyboard and mouse, I only did the nouveau driver... oups.

Try that Evdev input driver. No harm trying. Reversible, too.

@stoat.
Yes indeed. That's why I edited my post. I woke up Then I saw evdev browsing the Xorg driver page. I have BLFS with Xorg fully operational. Next step is Fluxbox etc.

I like Fluxbox. It's very easy to install and doesn't require a bunch of other stuff. There are some neat customizations you can do for it, too.

To display your own image as the desktop background (it's not really a desktop, but it looks like one), you can install Which-2.20, libast-0.7 (not in BLFS), Eterm-0.9.6 and Eterm-bg-0.9.6 (not in BLFS). All of those are simple to install (I can tell you where they are and how to install them). Put the image file, say background.png, in $HOME/.fluxbox. Then edit $HOME/.fluxbox/overlay to add these lines...
Viola! That image is the background. I like to use Gimp to crop and scale my background files. I have a scheme arranged for about a dozen images to be randomly rotated for each log in.

To establish automatic starting of X and Fluxbox, edit $HOME/.xinitrc to add something like this...
If you don't have D-Bus yet, omit that dbus-launch part of the command. The redirect is to keep junk off my tty console (it's visible at log out time). Then put this in $HOME/.bash_profile...
To adjust the panel clock properties, right-click on the panel clock. Then edit the clock properties to the following for hours, minutes, AM/PM, weekday, and date (see strftime for more possibilities)...
If your fonts look bad, try adding your own fonts to the system. I find adding my collection of Windows TTF fonts in $HOME/.fonts followed by fc-cache -fv makes my Fluxbox look kinda nice (other stuff pick those up, too.)

To get the Fluxbox menu to pop up via a key press, you can establish a keyboard shortcut for that. I use that useless Windows menu key (usually next to the right Ctrl key) for a shortcut to the Fluxbox menu. This is handy when the desktop is hidden by maximized windows, but I forgot how to set that up. And it is mysteriously missing from my notes. If I find that information, I will return and add the steps for that very useful Fluxbox modification.

...Okay, I still can't find my notes about this, but I can plainly see that I put the following lines in $HOME/.fluxbox/keys to use the Windows menu key for the Fluxbox menu ...
I vaguely remember some command that I used to identify the name of a key when it is pressed. Then the Fluxbox wiki has a page about the keyboard shortcuts. I'm sort of pissed that I have misplaced that stuff.

...I never found my notes, but as it turns out, everything one needs to know is in that Fluxbox wiki about shortcuts. The terminal command to identify a key's name for the purpose of making it a Fluxbox shortcut is xev. Example output for that useless Windows key after running xev...
Then, I used that "Menu" name in the $HOME/.fluxbox/keys file as described above. I got the :RootMenu part for the Fluxbox menu elsewhere in the wiki and by just studying the existing keys file. Simple after all.

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I was using Openbox before I switched from Arch to Slackware. Slckware comes with Fluxbox so I gave it a try and like it. I guess I have a somewhat decent configuration within Slackware but I will probably return to this post to inspire me.