GNU/Hurd Newbie question: Configure Xorg with twm for normal user

Hello,


Today is November 13, 2011.  I am a new user of GNU/Hurd.  I am comfortable
with a command line interface, and originally intended to use GNU/Hurd
exclusively in CLI mode, but over the past week decided I would like to
install Xorg and use a lightweight window manager like twm so I can have
several terminal windows open on the same screen.  I am also planning on
taking an introductory computer programming class in the spring, and for
that reason it would be nice to have a GUI as well.  For the record, I also
own a stable Windows 7 laptop, and will most likely use that for the
programming course.  However, I'm still very interested in setting up xorg.


So far I have Xorg running on my computer and have twm set as the default
window manager.  I am having the following problem.  When I type startx as
root, everything seems to work as expected; I have a black screen with an
X-shaped cursor and twm behaves as normal.  When I type startx as a normal
user, I only get a black screen.  There’s no cursor, and the system is
unresponsive to anything I do on the mouse or the keyboard.  The only way
to exit from the blank screen is to power down with the power button on the
front of my computer.  I always fsck – y twice after that happens.


What have I done to attempt to fix this?  First, I followed the
installation instructions explicitly at Debian GNU/Hurd [1].  An odd thing
happened during installation of xorg, rxvt, and twm.  I needed three or
four apt-get install sequences on xorg, and two ‘aptitude update’ before I
had ‘everything’ from xorg.  What I mean is that after the first round of
aptitude update and apt-get install xorg, the command startx had no
effect.  After the third or fourth round, startx initiated when I was
root.  Dpkg-reconfigure x11-common did not work for me.  Also, I found that
I had no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11, and for some reason, my GNU/Hurd
system does not even have dpkg-reconfigure (perhaps I need to modify PATH
to find it???).  I found this link to generate a xorg.conf file [2] and
moved it to /etc/X11, though I recently renamed it because I learned from
reading my startx log that xinit was using a different configuration file
rendering xorg.conf useless anyway.


Pierre Thibault said that xorg does work and mentioned something about
client side issues about one year ago [3].


There is plenty of other information about xorg and unresponsive black
screens in normal user mode, but much of it is outdated and aimed at
non-Debian GNU/Linux distributions.  I am writing to ask for direct help or
online references to detailed current information about configuring xorg to
function properly for a normal user.  Please tell me if you need more
information from me and I will provide it, if possible.


Thank you!

Mark



[1]  http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Xorg

[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-03/msg00021.html