First, let me apologize to Akemi Yagi for my delay in answering his last query. After failing with 4.8 I realized that I had at least one and possibly two computers capable of handling 5.3 (one was newly purchased second-hand and had many unknowns about it. The other was well documented but its power was obscured by a thick layer of Windows XP).
To answer Akemi's last questions, yes, I am sure that the disks were all 4.8. I checked with md5sum before burning the cds and am not sure how to check further than that. I never got past using the first (modified) disk that I downloaded from the url you gave me, because anaconda failed to find a file - having to do with GNOME, so the process aborted. Again I apologize for delaying my response, but I have been occupied again with 5.3, but on the newer computers.
5.3 installed easily and correctly on the first machine (celeron, 1.2Ghz, 512M ram, 80G disk). With the second machine I am getting consistent failure to load X, despite many attempts that appeared to be good installs.
For the last attempt I had about 160G of disk available, over 800M of ran, and (as reported by the BIOS, a pentium 3 processor. Unfortunately a remaining big unknown for that system is the Mhz rating for the processor. When I got it, with a broken XP system on it, it was set at 550Mhz. The BIOS allows three choices: 366, 500, and 7xx (I don't remember the last value precisely, but the system wont boot at all, so it's moot). I have mainly messed with the 550 setting, but have occasionally tried at 360. It doesn't seem to make a difference.
On that system the output of uname -a gives 2.6.18-128.3l5 for the kernel, and "i686 i686 i386" at the end. Free shows 905240 total and 231688 used.
Console mouse services work. When I attempt to load X I get the hollow-x cursor, then the black screen with the nautilus window and then white bars at top and bottom, along with an arrow cursor. The white bars get populated with some icons and then comes the blue screen with the doily-like design, but at that point the system appears to be hung. The computer, home, and trash icons do not appear on the desktop, nor does a mouse-pointer, and wiggling the mouse does nothing.
I have compared the /var/log/Xorg.0.log files from the two machines (one that works, one that doesn't), and they both end in the same place:
<snip> (--) <default pointer>: PnP-detected protocol: "ExplorerPS/2" (II) <default pointer>: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded <eof>
I would appreciate any help in getting X to work on this second computer
Thanks,
Buz Davis