On Sun, Mar 21, 1999 at 04:18:20PM -0800, Stephen Eastman wrote:
> I am new to netbsd-sun3 and have a 3/80 with 12 megs of RAM running off of
> NFS on a mac netbsd box.

Cool.

> Everything in command line mode runs great, but when trying to run X,  the
> root window comes up, and then I get the message: "waiting for X server to
> shut down" and then back to the command prompt.  Most of the time, no error

That's a failure in your .xinitrc or xinitrc script probably. But you
already know that.

> messages, (Although maybe twice, I have seen something like 'no fpu
> support' but of course the fpu is detected upon boot up)  Other than that,
> nothing but the message stated above. (I did a 'startx >& startx.log and

And startx is just a wrapper around xinit. 

> got nothing else).  I am wondering if X requires any tweaking: I noticed
> that there are no .Xresources or .Xmodmap files which are referenced in
> xinitrc. Do I need to create these and populate them?  I know it's xinit

No.

> itself that's failing rather than any apps, because I created an empty
> ~/.xinitrc and it still bombed.  Running just the server brings up the root
> window fine with mouse support.  I can even run xdm without any problem.  

Um, if you have an empty .initrc than that's a serious problem.

See, startx and xinit (and xdm as well, but that's a different set of
scripts) work on the concept of a "session". Sessions can run for
variable amounts of time. So, xinit needs a way to tell when the session
is over.

The xinitrc or ~/.xinitrc file is run by xinit when the session is starting.
This file runs after the X server is started and starts up a few clients.
Then the last thing it does typically is start a window manager or xterm. The 
session lasts until that window manager (or xterm) exits.

If startx runs, starts up an X server, and then exits then something in 
the xinitrc file didn't work. Try copying /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc
over top of your ~/.xinitrc and then editing it until you get it to work.

Start out by commenting out everything except the xterm (or window 
manager) at the end. If it still doesn't work then change the
xinitrc to use full paths.

Once you get that working you can uncomment until it breaks and you
know exactly what to fix.
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"You know, I think I can hear the machine screaming from here...  \
'help me! hellpp meeee!'"  - Heather Flanagan, 14:52:23 Wed Jun 10 1998