Re: xfree86 security update overwrites XF86Config-4
On Saturday 20 September 2003 9:06 pm, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Geoff Thurman wrote:
> > Matthias Czapla wrote:
> > > I just want to say... ARRRGHHH!
> >
> > Yes, this happened to me too; my mouse dropped out.
>
> Put me in that list too. I took the xserver-xfree86 security update
> and sure enough this fluffed the file and the edits in that section
> were lost. But this is only used when X11 starts. So you won't
> notice until you log out. At that time X11 won't be able to restart.
> I did not notice until the next day.
>
That is exactly what happened to me as well. It certainly woke me up
though.
> > I thought perhaps I'd made a mistake somewhere.
>
> You did. I did. We did. [...]
> Of course I have a backup of the file and I recovered it with no
> trouble at all. But if someone else does this without knowing the
> details this could cause some confusion and they would be offline
> until this got fixed.
It did cause some confusion to me, and for a while I was flummoxed. I
could still get online though. I had fun learning to launch everything
and google with the keyboard rather than the mouse, and found a post
somewhere advising the use of X -configure in a similar situation. That
did the trick for me. It gave me a file called (I think)
XF86Config.new, and I was able to manually copy the correct
XF86Config-4 mouse settings across from that. I tried to simply cp the
whole file across at first, but that produced ugly errors when I tried
to start X. Fortunately, I had thought to make a copy of the
XF86Config-4 file first, or I might have been even more confused. As it
was, I was able to restore the original and make the three or four
small changes necessary (although perhaps only one of them was really
needed). It all cost me a few hours, but I feel more confident about
sorting out problems now. It is possible that more than just the mouse
settings were trashed in the update, but if that is the case nothing
else has gone noticeably wrong yet.
>
> Here is one solution.
The rest of your email scares me, as did an earlier one from Colin
Watson on this or a similar thread. I'll have another look at them
before I mess with xfree86 the next time. ; )
Cheers
Geoff
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