Intro, Graphical Login After Serial Install, Accessibility?

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi,
This is my first post so here's a little intro. If you'd like to skip it 
just search for the ENd intro. tag.

Intro:
I'm a sight-impaired Finnish computer enthusiast and a long time DOS and 
WIndows user. I would call myself a power-user on those platforms and 
program in the small re-creationally in Perl, Java and so on. Still I'm 
truely a Linux newbie and really don't want to adjust things if I don't know 
what I'm adjusting, if you know what I mean, <smile>. I've been spoiled by 
the GUI and thus am mainly interested in playing around with Gnome and Gnome 
apps at this point. Some programming tools interest me. too, and I'm doing 
music as a hobby so accessible MIDi sequencers, multi-track recording and 
virtual synths are high on the wish list.

Because of my less than stellar experiences with RedHat, Mandrake and Debian 
I decided not to dedicate a real machine for Ubuntu. In stead I'm running 
Ubuntu inside a virtual machine in Windows using Virtual PC.

I also learned the hard way that Linux accessibility isn't quite up to that 
of Windows or OS X. I figured out early on that I'd be probably using my 
Windows screen reader (Dolphin Supernova) and a terminal emulator for the 
console side. The benefits include highly intelligible that is formant 
based, multi-lingual (US English and Finnish) speech, speaking all the 
kernel messages and having the keyboard commands I know.

I hope to be able to run Gnopernicus with magnification and speech in Gnome, 
however. Being Ubuntu, whose strong in accessibility, it would be real great 
if the screen reader worked out of the box like it does on OS X. By the way, 
I considered joining the accessibility list but had second thoughts as the 
archive seemd to only have dev style posts rather than true user questions.

So now I have a Ubuntu system, it's the Badger I think, that seems to be up 
and running for the most part. Installation went well though slowly. To be 
able to install the thing on my own, I connected Ubuntu and the TeraTerm 
terminal emulator via a pair of virtual com ports which means that the 
installation is accessible right ffrom the start.
End intro.

So I'm using a serial terminal and am able to boot into Ubuntu. Rather than 
the graphical login screen mentioned in the Ubuntu Guide, though, I only get 
a text-based one. As I'm mostly into Gnome for accessibility reasons, I 
would use KDE because of the graphical theme editor if I could, changing the 
logon screen to a graphical one and having Gnopernicus up and running would 
be some of my primary goals. How would I go about doing these things?

My first attempt was to run the startx command which should usually run a 
graphical LInux desktop. The machine complained about not having permissions 
for doing that. I read the Wiki and tried again with the sudo startx command 
to give me admin privileges temporarily. Now it informed me that there's 
already a server running. I guess I'd better paste a quote to be exact here:

Output:
vellu at ubuntu:~$ sudo startx
Password:
xauth:  creating new authority file /home/vellu/.serverauth.5492
xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/vellu/.Xauthority
xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/vellu/.Xauthority
xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/vellu/.Xauthority
xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/vellu/.Xauthority

X: warning; process set to priority -1 instead of requested priority 0

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
        If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
        and start again.


Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
         at http://wiki.X.Org
 for help.

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

giving up.
xinit:  unable to connect to X server
xinit:  No such process (errno 3):  Server error.
xauth:  error in locking authority file /home/vellu/.Xauthority
vellu at ubuntu:~$
End output.

So what does this all mean and what can I do to get a graphical login 
screen? IF this is some issue with an undetected video card (it is an S3 
Trio in the emulated machine) which program do I run to set things up? I 
recall Debian having some sort of wizard for configuring the X Window System 
but my searches in the Wiki or using apropos have not turned up anything 
that useful.

I've been examining the Virtual PC screen itself with full-screen 
magnification, and as far as I can tell, it only displays some sort of 
static progress bar at this point and certainly no login screen. If the 
screen contents are significant, I can put up a PNG screenshot on-line.  I 
must confess I've yet to check out the URl hinted at in the output.

Lastly, I still wish LInux would be much more newbie friendly than it 
currently is. Errors like this with information close to 0 for most ordinary 
people, err non-Nix folk, are highly off-putting. COUnting displays from 0, 
printing out C's error variables and mixing messages from different modules 
as though they had their private little dialog going on. A bit of hand 
holding, like a polite Mac style message with some tech info at the end for 
those who need it, would be closer to my ideals. I guess I've never been 
much of a command-line guy, though I liked DOS before I had seen the GUI. 
But I'll stop right here before this gets seriously OT. Pardon me for the 
tangent.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/