I have onboard video on my gateway baby-at motherboard
I have never so much as rebooted a Gateway before so that really doesn't tell me much. My video card is an ATI Radeon 7200 w/ 128M AGP. What's your chipset? There are cheat codes in the Docs section to specify the type of driver needed for Xwindows to work on your particular video chipset.

yes i log in as root
when i try startx it keeps repeating (somethingidontremember): cannot start x server
The part you can't remember is what we need. There will actually be some useful error messages there. Write it down if nothing else.