I'm sorry this discussion became so dragged out, in part because of my
mistakes. I'm struggling with difficulty with things unrelated to it.

For some reason my keyboard stopped giving input, and I solved that by
booting to a different kernel.

The sucess I once had with a return from the line pgrep -a Xorg >&2
no longer regurns anything. This in principle means that the problem i
with startx. The program $ xeyes works properly.

The ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log simply terminates at line

     modeset(0): #2: hsize: 1280 vsize 1024  refresh: 60  vid: 32897

     The log has no (EE) errors
     It has these warnings:

       The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist
       Falling back to old probe method for fbdev
       VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support

There was mention of brail reader. but that turned out only to be a
program required by TeXLive. Seems no problem with display

    $ echo $DISPLAY
    :0.0

I have not problem after loggin in having $ xinit i3 start the i3
window manager. I tire running fluxbox with no startup file

--

     Haines Brown