This one time, at band camp, Ken Januski said: > I'm afraid I've had no luck and am afraid I may only be digging a deeper > hole for myself at this point. X was working beautifully for a year before I > upgraded. I did try to use the old XF86Config file but kept getting errors > about "/dev/mouse unable to get status of mouse fd (inappropriate ioctl for > device". I then got errors about "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc: gmc not > found" and then "panel" not found. Those last two errors were from lines in > my Xsession file and I put them in so long ago I no longer remember what > they did. I believe they are what I needed to get GNOME to start. > > I've commented them out and so don't get them anymore though X still doesn't > start because of the "unable to get status of mouse fd" error. Some research > on the archives led me to suspect that was related to gpm, something I'm not > that familiar with. Based on what I read I don't need gpm since I use X and > so I killed gpm. But still the errors continued. > > At this point the only clue I have as to how to proceed is in regard to the > mouse. I've fiddled with its settings in /dev, trying various links since > I no longer remember what it was when it worked. At one point after I'd > linked /dev/mouse to /tty0 I think, X no longer gave me the errors. But at > the same time it immediately shut down, i.e. it ran through all the startup > messages then said it was shutting down. > > Though I've spoken highly of Debian in the past I'm coming to the conclusion > that it's only for people who have the time to learn every bit of arcana > regarding every bit of their software and hardware. There's something good > about that and I'm happy such a distribution exists. But I'm also realizing > I don't have the time to go through this every time I want to make a change > on my system and it may just not be the distribution for me. I'm going to > spend a few more days on this but if I don't get it fixed after that I may > have to try something else. OK - lets's work through the various problems. I have: steve@gashuffer:~$ ls -l /dev/mouse lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Nov 16 2001 /dev/mouse -> /dev/ttyS1 steve@gashuffer:~$ ls -l /dev/ttyS1 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 Jul 26 13:26 /dev/ttyS1 (not sure why the dialout group - probably legacy serial line for modem) Make sure you have actually removed all of the v3.x X packages, and that they have been replaced by v4.x packages. `dpkg -l > packages.list` will give you a file with a list of all packages on your system, and their state. You can look through to make sure everything is as it should be. If you find package names are cut off by tab widths, preface the above comand with COLUMNS=100 If you don't use gpm in the console, kill it or remove it. You cannot use the XF86Config file that potato used - Xv4 uses a different format config file, and you'll need to generate a new one. X -configure will get you a basic working one that you can then edit - you'll want to look it over to make sure that it points to the device that your mouse is actually attached to, and that it figured out your video card and monitor correctly. Don't worry about getting acceleration going just yet, we'll get you a working X server first. After that, as root, follow the directions you see on the screen. Does X start? If not, write back, you'll have to adjust the config file it generatesd for you. If it does start, then try it as your user. If it still falls over, then the problem is in you .xsession or .xinitrc - the easiest thing to do is comment out everything but the basics of what you use, e.g. gnome-session or wmaker or whatever. Just note that the new gnome-session has a way to start other programs at start-up - you no longer need to specify them all in .xsession. HTH, Steve -- The default Magic Word, "Abracadabra", actually is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase "ha-Bracha dab'ra" which means "pronounce the blessing".
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