As I stated previously, I do not consider this a definitive, exhaustive guide on how to do anything I'm doing in this post. If you try this for yourself, don't come crying to me if or when it breaks.

I originally made the first SLS post not only so I could have something to do, plus document Softlanding Linux System, but also to entertain the members of LearnixTV's Discord server (shout out, big dawg. I know ur reading this). The reception was quite good on the Discord server, so I felt motivated to do this second part sooner. Hopefully it's up to snuff for everyone.

Due to networking being a pain in the ass to get working on old Linux, I've since removed the network card from 86Box. Unfortunately, it still throws up annoying errors that get in the way of the login screen. I think I'll have to work on that outside the blog on my own time.

As I found out later down the line, the X Window System was kinda bloated even back in the 90s, as I had to bump of the RAM from 16MB to 32MB, which I'm fairly certain was a lot on a PC back then.

As it turns out, merely typing in "startx" immediately after installing SLS won't get you very far, as I found out here:

Bear in mind, at this point, I had not upgraded my RAM yet, so it had to rely on swap space, which still wasn't enough, thus it could not launch at all.

Next, I discovered by combing through the README that came with the SLS mirror on ibiblio that I mentioned in the last post, that you have to do a little bit of configuration first before you can just startx.

Namely, it said that I had to go to /usr/X386/lib/X11/ and read the necessary INSTALL.base file, and THAT told me that once I did everything else it had said, that I'd have to edit the file Xconfig in the same directory. This Xconfig file serves as the main form of configuring X11 in SLS.

I start tinkering with the Xconfig, and discover the only thing I needed to do to make everything work (aside from upgrading the RAM) was to change the video driver that was to be used. In 86Box, I've set up a Trident TVGA 8900B video card, so I changed the driver in Xconfig to the closest equivalent and PRESTO! Everything just magically worked! See: Chipset "tvga8900c" placed above the original line, which I've commented out.

Suddenly (upon generating a .xinitrc) I could now startx and be greeted by twm in all its glory.

I should also mention that this entire time, I was able to start an X session, but only through X386mono, a black-and-white version of X11 with lower hardware requirements; However, it didn't work very well, as I couldn't open any windows such as a terminal within X386mono, rendering it useless, thus I had to do a hard reset to exit it each time.

I've enjoyed using Softlanding Linux System, but I think I'm gonna call it here. I know this post was a fair bit shorter, but there seemed to be less to do to get X working than I thought. In all, I hope you enjoyed this.