I have made a bit of progress on the problem -- but only a bit. (1) The keymap seems to be part of the problem: all the modifier keys are, as far as I can tell, dead. That's why keyboard-oriented tiling WMs are more or less stuck (goomwwm, cwm, dwm, etc.) (2) However, twm works as well as it ever did. (3) I followed the gentoo guide to setting up kernel modesetting using the intel graphics driver, and it made things appreciably worse: when the kernel boots and the graphical framebuffer is supposed to take over, the screen simply goes black. I can ssh in, though, and see that according to dmesg the inteldrmfb has successfully loaded, so what gives? (4) I also got no joy whatsoever at blind-typing into the console to start X, which, again, I could see by ssh was supposedly running but only gave a blank screen. All this on the internal 1680x1050 laptop screen. So while it was blank, I thought, why not, and plugged in an external VGA monitor. Voila! The console came up on the external and the internal screens. Better yet, so did X with twm. It seems to respond to xrandr, too. For one last oddity, I dropped to the console, unplugged the external monitor, and the internal screen still runs console/X just fine. Go figure. This is all on a Lenovo 3000 n100 0768 model, which I recall was finicky the last time I set it up (back in 2006 or so). But I don't recall dead keymaps, and, while I had to use the i915resolution hack back then, that should all have been superseded by kernel modesetting... -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-4951 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42