The other day I shut down my Sid box and left if off for several days.
Then when I came back to it tonight, I'm seeing some weird behaviour.
For example, the mouse doesn't work, via gpm in console.
I can't start X via "startx"; it complains about no /dev/tty0 device.
And sure enough, it doesn't, although there are lots of other
/dev/tty[] devices.
I was getting errors about a Windows partition, and sure enough, the
device file /dev/hda1 was missing, although other /dev/hda[} files
were there. I ran "./MAKEDEV hd" which fixed the missing hda1 file. I
ran "./MAKEDEV generic" which fixed the missing /dev/tty0 file, and
now startx works.
Even after that "/MAKEDEV generic" my mouse still doesn't work, and
the device file /dev/psaux exists (and existed prior to the
"generic"). (If I had a Knoppix CD handy I'd see if the mouse works
there - it "feels" like a hardware problem, but these other issues,
and the suddenness of the mouse problem, indicate a software problem.)
Sometimes, like if I try to do a "sudo", even something simple like
"sudo ls", I get:
sudo: unable to lookup westk03 via gethostbyname()
(westk03 is the name of this computer), and once I got something like
"hostname does not exist", even though the command "hostname" reports
"westk03" and that's what's in /etc/hostname.
Really weird stuff.
I also saw something along the way about devfs or something similar,
and I'm wondering if we're in a transition from the /dev filesystem to
some newer on-the-fly "devfs" setup (based on vague understandings and
remembrances), and my box has gotten hosed by a bad transition. Or
maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree.
At any rate, anyone have any idea what happened, and more importantly,
how to get my box fixed?
Thanks!