[Tfug] trouble shooting xorg

[christopher floess]

here's an interesting situation with which I could use some help: xorg
has stopped working. I type startx and I get a black screen and that's
it. It's really weird because it's not like the black screen you get
when your monitor turns off, it looks like it's painted black, like
there's something there. Unfortunately there is no mouse cursor and no
window manager.

Pressing ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work, though ctrl+alt+delete does
reboot. Ctrl+alt+F[x]  doesn't get me out to other virtual terminals
either and I've checked the logs and run script, neither of which seem
to show anything revealing.

I've reinstalled Xorg and tried running a different window manager.
Xorg -configure gets me a new xorg.conf.new, but running the resulting
xorg.conf.new like this:

X -config xorg.conf.new

also produces the black screen. I've tried startx under several
different users, including simply adding a new user, each with the
same result. Using the system without X hasn't given me any problems
and, as a final note, this happened without any prior abnormal
behaviour, i.e a system crash or something. I simply shut my laptop
down at school and then restarted it when I got home.

Otherwise, my system is fine, in fact booting into windows and writing
this email is working just fine. So, what's the problem? I have no
idea. Hopefully someone will be able to help me here. Thanks in
advance ~ Chris.