Re: Stupid newbie question solved, plus more stupid newbie tricks !
Christopher:
If you're ever stuck in X, to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop to Mingetty1.
Ctrl-Alt-F7 puts you back in X.
glen
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 07:57:54PM -0500, Owens, Christopher wrote:
> Hallelujah!
>
> Well, there's good news and a funny/sad story. Now I understand why friends
> of mine said I probably knew enough about Linux to be dangerous.
>
> I am sending it all back to the list so the info will be searchable in the
> archives.
>
> The good news is that several people wrote me to tell me to make a symlink
> to /dev/psaux by doing 'ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse' and that worked.
> Thanks to everyone who responded!
>
> The bad news is the last thing I had done before typing that was to change
> the mouse setting in xf86config to 'Microsoft' instead of PS/2. That made
> the mouse pointer behaves unpredictably when X finally started. Further bad
> news comes in the form of settings I made at install time, telling it I
> wanted a graphical login screen, and the fact that the window manager I
> installed (Window Maker) doesn't understand keystrokes to move around the
> screen. The icing on the cake was that, knowing I was not planning to
> dual-boot, I eliminated the number of seconds LILO waits before starting to
> boot.
>
> So on boot, I got a graphical login screen, and could log in, but it goes
> directly to x-windows, where my Window Maker doesn't seem to understand any
> keyboard commands, and my mouse pointer zips up to the upper left corner of
> the screen and stays there. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even exit X
> to reboot! I had to shut it down dirty.
>
> Since I am at work, I didn't have my rescue floppy handy, so I went and made
> a copy of tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/), and while it was booting, I
> looked up how to mount my hard drive. When I mounted it, mount warned me
> that I ought to run e2fsck. When I ran e2fsck, it gave me a warning that
> running it on a mounted filesystem might cause severe damage!
>
> This left me in a quandary. Should I access the drive while it was dirty?
> Or risk the damage? Fortunately I finally realized that what e2fsck meant
> for me to do was unmount the drive, then run e2fsck, then remount it. I did
> so, and edited my XF86Config to put the right mouse (PS/2) back in. After
> the reboot, I could use the mouse to exit xwindows!
>
> Next problem was getting rid of the graphical login screen I had specified
> prematurely, xdm. After searching around on the net and on my hard drive I
> determined what I needed to do was '/usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f xdm remove'.
>
> Finally X was working, but only in 640x480. My laptop is capable of 800x600
> resolution, so I went and found someone with the same laptop as I
> (http://www.raster.com/950n/) who had posted their XF86Config. I copied it
> into /etc/X11/, but starting X only resulted in a message saying that font
> 'fixed' could not be found. Comparing the two files, I noticed that the
> donor file had only one line of 'FontPath "unix/:-1"' but the working (at
> low res) file had about 12 such lines each with specific font names. I cut
> and pasted in the specific font names, removed the 'unix/:-1' line, and
> tried again, and now it works.
>
> The most important lesson I learned is don't install xdm until you know X is
> solid, if ever!
>
> Thanks again to those who helped! And if anyone needs to get potato running
> on an old AST laptop, I know more than I used to about the process.
>
> Chris Owens
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Owens, Christopher [mailto:christopher.owens@analog.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 1:38 PM
> To: debian-laptop@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Stupid newbie question: eraserhead-style mouse
>
>
> Kind people,
>
> This is my first question to the list, and it is the first time I have tried
> to install linux since the kernel was version 1.2.
>
> I have installed potato on an old laptop using http. The laptop is an AST
> Ascentia 950n, and claims to have a P120, 16MB of RAM, and I have upgraded
> the hard drive to a 5.7GB unit. I have net thanks to a PCMCIA network card.
>
> I think when I installed, I may have had the built-in mouse disabled. When
> I try to start X now, I get an error that it can't open /dev/mouse, and,
> indeed, there does not seem to be any /dev/mouse. X has never successfully
> run on this system.
>
> Microsoft Mouse Driver version 8.20 works on a DOS boot floppy I have handy,
> and the mouse is usable.
>
> How can I get a /dev/mouse?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Chris Owens
>
>
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--
Glen S Mehn
Lead Systems Administrator SquareTrade, Inc
glen@squaretrade.com Building Trust in Transactions (sm)
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