Re: Vedr: New installation - Xserver failure
At 07:21 PM 1/18/1999 +0000, you wrote:
>Quoting faoho@ringamt.dk (faoho@ringamt.dk):
>> >The Xserver can's start.
>> >It's looking for a file, that doesn't exist: /usr/bin/X11/XF86_NONE
>> >It shouldn't look for that file - but for the XF86SVGA, I guess.
>> >
>> >I guess there is a configurationsfile somewhere, in which I have
>> >to change the XF86_NONE to >XF86SVGA.
>> >
>> >What file is that???
>>
>> Wouldn't it be an easy solution to change the name of the existing XF86SVGA
>> - file to the requested name XF86_NONE?
>
>Apologies if I've missed some sort of joke, but that's the kind of
>change which is easily made on a linux system, leading you gently
>towards a state where things don't quite work correctly, but nobody
>can help you fix it because nothing quite matches the documentation.
>
>For example, why not get rid of root? Change the first four characters
>of /etc/passwd to something else. No problem: superuser privilege
>comes from being 0, not from the name root. The trouble is, before
>long something will break.
>
>Cheers,
>
But to answer the question, the /etc/X11/Xserver file is the one that
references XF86_NONE. The first line references that, and it should be
changed to XF86_SVGA (or whatever server you're running).
Also, when I was starting out (I'm just *barely* beyond that stage now),
the documentation I read (Linux Unleashed or the Linux nutshell book, I
don't remember), indicated to me that the Xserver file was a link to the
server, rather than a config file that points to the server. So I changed
the link. Later I realized that Debian doesn't do things that way. I don't
know if the book I was following was out of date, or if Debian does things
differently in this regard than other dists did when the book was written,
but at any rate, "nothing quite matched [my] documentation".
Nonetheless, it's a good point that David makes; the Debian documentation
takes precedence over other documentation, and doing things that "work" but
aren't the correct way can cause problems later on. A problem is that it's
hard for newbies to make the distinction between Debian documentation and
any other documentation they might find, which is a good argument for
making man pages more friendly to the newbie.
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