I think we've got too far for it, the startx in local.start does have some drawbacks, the system will become nonresponsive if I switch back to the console, and the X seems running on VT2 instead of VT7, I studied the xdm script and found I've missed lots of important steps, for stability, I tried a login manager "slim" that they recommended, it worked perfect for me, everything are back to normal now! thanks again guys. fei