Two weeks ago I successfully installed Wheezy (testing). Yesterday I did the
latest upgrades, and now my X-Windows display is unreadable. Here are the
details:
1. I called "apt-get upgrade", which listed 50 packages it was holding back.
Most were xorg-related. I did not proceed with that upgrade but called
"apt-get install" to install the 50 packages, and then "apt-get
autoremove" as suggested. I then proceeded again with "apt-get upgrade",
which installed many more packages, including a kernel upgrade from
2.6.32-5-686 to 2.6.38-2-686. I got an xorg warning for people running
the ati module, which I was not. Another error warned about e100, which I
am running.
2. Now I can I reboot into a text console, which is how I have things set up.
At that point everything seems fine; the keyboard and sound both work. I
have an internet connection, so I guess e100 is not a problem.
3. I then call startx, which tries to use fvwm to put up windows. Instead I
get something resembling a display grossly out of sync. The same happens
if I start gdm3 (gnome). However, there is a perfectly nice arrow icon
for the mouse, and it responds to the mouse. The worst thing is that
neither CTRL-ALT-F1 nor CTRL-ALT-Backscape lets me drop back to the
console. I have to do a hardware reset and reboot (or do "sleep 30;
reboot" in another console before I try startx).
I just did a full backup of my healthy Wheezy disk this weekend. To my
surprise, Xorg.0.log now is identical to the one from the good system, except
for a date. It does seem that something more than X is screwed up, since the
keyboard won't let me drop out of X. Since the mouse works (as well as
"sleep; reboot"), the system hasn't totally crashed. Grub still offers me
the chance to boot into 2.6.32, but that crashes with a screen full of kernel
errors.
I will report some lines seen on booting the new kernel, even though they may
not underlie the display problem. Here they are:
Starting rpcbind daemon...rpcbind: Cannot open '/var/run/rpcbind/rpcbind.xdr'
file for reading, errno 2 (No such file or directory)
CPUFreq Utilities: Setting ondemand CPUFreq governor...disabled, governor not
available...done.
saned disabled: edit /etc/default/saned
SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: disabled, see /etc/default/spamassassin
Finally, I will mention that I did all the same upgrades yesterday on another
Wheezy system (different hardware) with no problem.
I would welcome any suggestions for fixing this. I can post xorg.conf and
Xorg.0.log if necessary, although that doesn't seem to be the problem.
Thanks.