Re: How to purge and reinstall XFree86 [woody] ?
On Mon, 4 Dec 2000 13:53:05 -0600, Brian Boonstra said:
> Ouch
>
> I've gotten myself into a real dill of a pickle. I run woody, but
> around Thanksgiving I hadn't upgraded for weeks. I did "apt-get upgrade"
> which screwed up KDE and X. After "apt-get dist-upgrade", uninstalling and
> reinstalling KDE (from 1.x to 2.x), and making a symlink from the X binary to
> xserver-3dlabs, I got things working.
>
> Or so I thought.
>
> Last night, I did another "apt-get upgrade" and X would no longer
> start. I tried using "apt-get remove" on xserver-common, and whatever other
> xfree86 related packages I could find. I made sure all the xfree86 version
> 3.x stuff was gone. Then I did "apt-get install" for the various version 4
> packages.
>
> Finally, I did xf86cfg, which is supposed to try to autodetect my
> hardware, then give me configuration options. It did give me an X screen
> with a cursor, but it hung after that. I rebooted, and now it just seems
> like it keeps trying to start the X server. It shows the VGA text startup
> screen, blinks a minute, then goes back to that screen.
>
> I can't even log in on the console!! I'm going to bring another
> machine home tonight so I can ssh in to try to fix this, but can anybody give
> me pointers as to what I need to do?
>
> I'm tempted to try the nuclear option -- back up the homedirs, dpkg
> --get-selections, wipe the disk, and start fresh. But that's inelegant, and
> lots of work. i would really appreciate other ideas.
>
I had a similar situation upon update to xserver-XFree86.
To get the xerver 'XFree86' to start i created xserverrc in
/etc/X11/xinit with the line 'exec XFree86'. Then 'startx' starts XFree86 and
reads your ~/.xsession for the window manager.
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