[ale] Limping laptop, locking X11

[John Mills]

ALErs -

Ahh, the noatalgia! I seem to be back with those old 'death-march' 
c. Slack.1-2 installations as I try to squeeze RH-7.3 into my Toshiba 
430CDT.

Specifically, I installed XFree86-*-4.2.0-8 and fvwm2-2.4.6-1 rpms. X 
seems to start OK with the XF86Config I set up, and 'top' from another 
console shows it apparently stable.

When I start any significant activity (such as moving windows around), the 
li'l #$%^!! locks up hard: no keyboard, no reset, nada. I get to cycle 
power to see life again.

Thinking 'fvwm2' might be the issue, I removed that RPM completely and 
tried starting 'gnome-wm' with the same result.

When I try 'init 5', the process is worse: immediate error message,
 "Id 'x' respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes"
 At least in that case I can shutdown the machine. &8-)

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

TIA.
 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu

PS1:
 RULE's 'Slinky' self-identifies as 'beta' code with 'alpha' 
 documentation, I think it's the opposite.  I'll be happy to meet Slinky
 when it's grown up a bit more.

PS2:
 I had it humming nicely with RH-6.*.