GNU/Hurd Newbie question: Configure Xorg with twm for normal user

[Mark Lies]

Hello,

Today is November 13, 2011.  I am a new user of GNU/Hurd.  I am comfortable with a command line interface, and originally intended to use GNU/Hurd exclusively in CLI mode, but over the past week decided I would like to install Xorg and use a lightweight window manager like twm so I can have several terminal windows open on the same screen.  I am also planning on taking an introductory computer programming class in the spring, and for that reason it would be nice to have a GUI as well.  For the record, I also own a stable Windows 7 laptop, and will most likely use that for the programming course.  However, I'm still very interested in setting up xorg.

So far I have Xorg running on my computer and have twm set as the default window manager.  I am having the following problem.  When I type startx as root, everything seems to work as expected; I have a black screen with an X-shaped cursor and twm behaves as normal.  When I type startx as a normal user, I only get a black screen.  There’s no cursor, and the system is unresponsive to anything I do on the mouse or the keyboard.  The only way to exit from the blank screen is to power down with the power button on the front of my computer.  I always fsck – y twice after that happens.

What have I done to attempt to fix this?  First, I followed the installation instructions explicitly at Debian GNU/Hurd [1].  An odd thing happened during installation of xorg, rxvt, and twm.  I needed three or four apt-get install sequences on xorg, and two ‘aptitude update’ before I had ‘everything’ from xorg.  What I mean is that after the first round of aptitude update and apt-get install xorg, the command startx had no effect.  After the third or fourth round, startx initiated when I was root.  Dpkg-reconfigure x11-common did not work for me.  Also, I found that I had no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11, and for some reason, my GNU/Hurd system does not even have dpkg-reconfigure (perhaps I need to modify PATH to find it???).  I found this link to generate a xorg.conf file [2] and moved it to /etc/X11, though I recently renamed it because I learned from reading my startx log that xinit was using a different configuration file rendering xorg.conf useless anyway.

Pierre Thibault said that xorg does work and mentioned something about client side issues about one year ago [3].

There is plenty of other information about xorg and unresponsive black screens in normal user mode, but much of it is outdated and aimed at non-Debian GNU/Linux distributions.  I am writing to ask for direct help or online references to detailed current information about configuring xorg to function properly for a normal user.  Please tell me if you need more information from me and I will provide it, if possible.

Thank you!

Mark

 

[1]  http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Xorg

[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-03/msg00021.html