Crazy first gnome session - panels/drawing problems [SOLVED]

Question

I was following the Beginner's guide almost religiously apart from Xorg config (I have an Intel 950 GM on lenovo thinkpad r60e, i use the intel driver, not i810), where I did my best to configure conservatively. installed gnome, then as root:
$ startx
i got three shell windows
$ gnome-session
and get the following:
every time a new window opens, i see its 'boundaries' first which hover with the pointer and then have to click to show it. as you can see, all the windows have panels displaying.
couple other things, I cannot find an xsession-errors file. if it exists, where would it be?
apologies for not being a code monkey. should i post my xorg.conf?
Last edited by elephantos (2008-06-14 06:58:45)

Answer 1

The behavior is perfectly expected.
You did 'startx' as root. Root has no .xinitrc by default, so startx called xinit and xinit looked for /root/.xinitrc. Not finding it, xinit resorted to using /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. If you study /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, you will notice that it calls twm. So you opened a twm session, which has 3 terminals open by default, and then tried starting GNOME on top of twm, which worked out kind of half twm, half-GNOMISH.