Re: Help... I think I've shot myself in the foot...

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Peter S. Hayes wrote:
> Hi all,
>  
> I've had Debian dual-booted with Win XP on my portable for about six 
> months. I haven't worked all the bugs out yet, but I've been getting 
> better! And I try using it for more of my personal work (my job requires 
> Windows at the moment).
>  
> Yesterday while at work, I was installing a package (R - 
> language/stats/graphing package) using dselect and, since there were 
> some required package upgrades, installed a couple of those also... 
> while working on my desktop (fool that I am) and being interrupted 
> occasionally with other people asking questions...
>  
> Somewhere - and I think this was in the configuration of a new xdm, but 
> I'm not sure - there was a screen explaining a setup of keyboards and 
> the choices I would be asked to choose from. This probably wasn't a good 
> time to do all of this, but hind sight is always 20/20. I picked a 
> "don't touch my keyboard" choice, thinking it would leave the present 
> arrangement (which was fine). Since rebooting this morning I cannot log 
> in at the X prompt. My mouse works fine, I have the X Window login 
> prompt (provided by xdm I think) but every key on my keyboard does 
> nothing except toggle the display window through three size 
> variations... I can do nothing but manually kill the power (with all the 
> corrupted files resulting).

  use journaling filesystem:-)

  what about ctrl-alt-f1? ctrl-alt-backspace?

  load system into single user mode (init=/bin/sh or something like 
that, check lilo docs) and disable X for the time being (see man 
update-rc.d, something like update-rc.d xdm remove should get rid of 
xdm, update-rc.d xdm defaults should make it start during boot)

  you can also try to login via network and run /etc/init.d/xdm stop

  then check which keyboard you have defined in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, 
it should look something like this:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Logitech Cordless iTouch"
        Driver          "keyboard"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xfree86"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "logicordless"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "us"
EndSection

  you just need to choose correct XkbModel, see 
/etc/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst for available models (one of the pc* 
should work for most of the keys)

	erik