RE: About to give up: No X after upgrade from Potato to Woody
Thanks for the advice Steve,
I've tried some of it. I removed gpm. I then took at look at what packages I
had and saw I had one for xserver-common version 3 as well as 4. I told
dselect to remove version 3. It told me it would remove:
task-x-windows-system-core
xf86setup
xserver-common-v3
xserver-sv3
xserver-svga
xserver-vga16
I trusted it on this and said ok. That seemed to work except for a note
telling me that I'd need to run dkpg-reconfigure xserver-s3v before I
restarted x.
I also linked /dev/mouse to /dev/ttys0, which is owned by root.
I then tried X -configure. That told me that /etc/X11/X was not executable.
startx told me the same thing. When I checked I then saw that /etx/X11/X is
a link to the svga server that I just got rid of!
So now I'm stuck in a new place and am not really sure if I've progressed or
not. Perhaps you can tell better than I. Unfortunately I now have to leave
for an 8 hour work shift. But if you have any more ideas as to what to try
next please let me know. I'd really like to get this straighened out.
Thanks,
Ken
-----Original Message-----
From: gashuffer09@comcast.net [mailto:gashuffer09@comcast.net]
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 2:05 PM
To: Debian
Subject: Re: About to give up: No X after upgrade from Potato to Woody
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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