Andy Chase

The hardest thing about installing XWindows, as it turned out, was waiting for it to compile. I was able to track down the horizontal and vertical ranges for my dinosaur Relisys monitor online, and the XF86Config script took care of the rest.



The only significant snag was my own fault; I chose the wrong mouse type in the configuration. Fixing it turned out to be quite easy...



Here's a good idea if you're setting up a Linux From Scratch installation on your computer, assuming the distro you were running while building your LFS system out is still available. If you're having trouble with a particular configuration option, just mount the partition with your other Linux distro and check the config files there... it's made things a lot easier for me. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, though - my original installation was Mandrake 8.0 running on a small ReiserFS partition, and after mounting that partition in LFS, Mandrake can't mount it at boot time anymore. Again, my own fault; I probably should have mounted it read-only.



Anyway, I repeat: Mount your old partition at your old risk. I'm not responsible for any damage you do to your system, etc.



Once X was running, my first priority was to get Mozilla running so that browsing is a little bit easier; I need to find a good window manager, and you can't view screenshots in Lynx.



Installing Mozilla meant installing GLib and GTK, which was a little bit tricky. Another thing I discovered: If you're installing GLib and GTK from scratch, make sure you run 'ldconfig' after installing GLib; otherwise, GTK throws an error about not being able to find the GLib library.



GLib and GTK install in /usr/local/lib by default, but Mozilla seems to expect them in /usr/lib. I wound up creating a bunch of symlinks from /usr/local/lib to /usr/local, but the next time I do this I'll probably just install the libraries right in /usr/lib instead.



But here I am, running Mozilla on my nice, clean, compiled-from-scratch Linux system. Once I get a window manager up and running, maybe I'll make up for not posting for the last three days.