[CentOS] problem installing CentOS 5.3

Mon Sep 28 01:42:21 UTC 2009
Buz Davis <buzdavis at earthlink.net>

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