Can you pastebin your .xinitrc? Also, you didn't mention if there is a lot of output to the console when you run startx. What I do to catch this sort of thing is I redirect stdout and stderr on the "exec" statement that launches my window manager, so that I don't miss errors that scroll past the screen too quickly. So my exec statement looks like the below: exec /usr/bin/awesome >/home/ejohnson/var/awesome.log 2>&1
