After configuring the Xconfig file, you can start the server with the startx command. There are a few things to take into consideration first, however.
Make sure that the directory /usr/bin/X11 is on your path. This directory contains all of the X binaries and the server itself.
Secondly, the X server requires a free VC to enable VC switching[Footnote]. In other words, you must have one of your VC's available, with no login process running on it. The easiest way to ensure this is to edit /etc/inittab and delete one of the getty lines which starts up a login process on each VC. In my inittab, for example, I run getty on /dev/tty1 through /dev/tty7 (that is, VC's 1 through 7), but not on /dev/tty8.
When running startx, the file $HOME/.xinitrc is read. This file is a shell script which contains commands to run after the X server is started. If this file doesn't exist, the file /usr/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc is used as a system-wide default instead. You can use this default file as a sample .xinitrc file.
Using X Windows is a large topic, and we won't try to cover it here. Read The X Window System User's Guide, or another book on using X, for details. See Appendix A information on this book.