So I went through the Slackware install, going the recommended route of installing all packages in the groups I selected.

I've logged in as root and created a new user, no problems. However, running 'startx' yields a blank screen.

I ran Xorgsetup and Xorgconfig, answering the questions to the best of my ability. Neither worked.

The more pressing problem is I stupidly went and edited my /etc/inittab to make it boot to runlevel 4, which means it boots straight to a black screen now.

Anyone got any suggestions as to how I can go about fixing this?

It's a laptop with a Trident CyberBlade i1, currently configured with 4MB RAM.

Thanks much.

Use your slack 10.1 cd #1 and boot from cdrom. there are instructions on screen how to use it as a rescue disk (basically copy the line verbatim). This should boot you into the system. From here you can edit your /etc/inittab file back to runlevel 3

Also you could probably use ctrl +alt + backspace to kill X from your regular login, not sure if this will work.

Once you fix that problem then it's onto the other one. What type of video card do you have? The output from lspci should give you some info on it. Once you figure this out you probably need to change the driver in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to change the driver.

For an ati radeon card, just change the vesa framebuffer device to "radeon" for nvidia it's either nv or nvidia, i'm not sure. But this might be one of your problems. (it looks like your laptop might use a via integrated device, search around for the name of the via driver name for linux).

Thanks. I was able to get back to the command line by hard-rebooting and typing "Linux 3" at the LILO prompt.

lspci lists the video card as "Trident Microsystems CyberBlade i1 (rev 6a)".

Did a bit more research and found Xorg's log file at /var/log/Xorg.0.log .

It said the X server was shutting down because it couldn't find a pointer device. Looking in "man xorg.conf" pointed me to a ServerFlag that makes it ignore mouse device errors. Put that in the xorg.conf file, and now X works fine. But with no mouse.

How can I get this to recognize the Synaptics touchpad I have on this laptop?

I have a synaptics touch device as well and it works find under the PS/2 protocol and also the IMPS/2 protocol.

Back to the Xorg display thing, you might also want to try the drivers "trident" or "cyberblade" I don't know if they were included in the kernel modules support but I've seen this in XFree86 conf files so you might luck out. You're probably just using the generic VESA device which won't be able to give you great screen resolutions or video speed.

But for the mouse, again, i'd try the ps/2 protocol. Find the section in the xorg.conf file for the mouse and make sure it says option ps/2. If that doesn't work try the imps/2
Option "Protocol" "ps/2"
or
Option "Protocol" "imps/2"

Worked perfectly with PS/2 and Device: /dev/psaux

Thanks a bunch!

Hey, one other thing I happened to come across last night. If you want to enable the tap-clicking property (tapping the touchpad constitutes a mouse click) and you are compiling your own kernel, make sure the evdev driver is loaded, it's in device files - Input devices - listed as something like event something or other. As long as this is enabled you should be able to use the tap for mouseclick feature.

Also, here's a link to some good info on it:

http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/