so i try manually starting the x server with:

[Al Johnson]

On Friday 09 January 2009, Harry L. Lee wrote:
> thanks! I was at the boot menu and tried dfu, thus:
> harry at galaxy:~$ .//dfu-util -l
> dfu-util - (C) 2007 by OpenMoko Inc.
> This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
>
> harry at galaxy:~$
>
> which does not look encouraging.

As others have mentioned you will need root privs to run dfu-util 
successfully. The other possible problem is the relatively short inactivity 
timeout on uboot - it may have shut down before you managed to run dfu-util. 
You can keep it awake by pressing the Aux button from time to time or make 
sure you have the commands ready to run before starting uboot.