feeling really roasted, exhausted, depressed and miserable after being so
badly flamed, the brave unix newbie continues his mission...

ok. I thought I'd summarise the findings for you all.
1. Ok, so I'm not a unix boff. that's why i'm messing with netbsd - so i
can become one.
2. xinit *is* finding .xinitrc. It was originally reporting syntax errors
in that file, as i found by eliminating the offending line.
3. xinit, whether run directly, or from startx, nevertheless still reports
an error (it orginally reported 2 errors, it now only reports one). The
error it reports for all users trying to run startx, is: server not found
- or words to that effect.
4. it fills the screen with the desktop, shows the x cursor, flashes the
error at the bottom of the screen momentarily as well as scrolls the
desktop pattern up the screen. It then clears the screen and shows a blank
console prompt, not running x.
5. if I run xdm it behaves a bit better. But i have been advised by people
on this list that there is something wrong with doing it that way, and, if
i do it that way, the .xinitrc file does not get read. It only reads the
.xinitrc file if i run it by using startx or xinit. 
6. I understand that startx is a shell script which ultimately runs xinit
anyway.

>From all the evidence, I can only presume that
1. there is something wrong with xinit or startx (ie, netbsd problem)
2. there is something wrong with something somewhere else. I have
discovered that for some reason, the tar file did not contain the standard
settings files, esp those in /usr/X11R6/lib/x11/xdm/. I presume part of
the problem lies there. Has anyone else had this problem? I installed the
tar file from root, so i cannot see why these files should be missing,
except that they may have not been in that tar file. I have not been able
to find them anywhere on the disk, despite running find, and have not
found them in the original tar file, depsite doing a tar tvf x11.tar |
grep etc... which i had previously used to find and extract a new copy of
xinit (just in case it was broken). No luck. Are these settings files
missing from the distribution? I presume not, but maybe they were missing
from the distribution *I* downloaded. Has anyone had this problem? Has
everyone had to build their x settings files from absolute scratch?

If no-one has had such a problem, then i can only presume there is
something wrong with my setups and this is not a netbsd issue, in which
case i'll give up and go somewhere where i hopefully will not get as badly
flamed as i have been. Not sure where. On other lists i'll prolly get told
to go away because my OS version is wrong... Anyway, I really appreciate
the help i get from people who have helped. I mean that.

still shaking from the shocking reactions sent to me...
:-(

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/public partition/
My listserv: subscr@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za (any message with a body)
On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Colin Wood wrote:

> Did you in fact redirect standard error to the file as well as stdout?  
> You might have to do this using sh instead of csh, since I think that the 
> startx script is a sh script.  You might want to hack the startx script 
> to echo everything it does as well, just so you know where it dies.
> 
> Later.
> 
> -- 
> Colin Wood                                      ender@is.rice.edu
> Consultant                                        Rice University
> Information Technology Services                       Houston, TX
>