On Sat, 26 May 2012 00:45:21 +0000, Hendrik Boom wrote: > > why, oh why does the choice of kernel determine the display manager. > Possibly something worse is screwed up. Possibly my menu.lst is giving > me a different root directory? I'll have to check. If I've been boting > varying combinations of root directory and /boot partition, things may > have gotten truly borked.
This does seem to be the problem. Looking carefully, I find that the last few testing kernels (exactly the ones that were causing me trouble) were paired off with the root file system from ,y installation of squeeze on the same machine. The one that worked was properly paired off with the root file system from testing. It's not clear to me why this happened, but it would adequately explain why I ended up with a kernel/ xorg mismatch. Of course, in the course of trying to fix things, I ended up making changes inconsistently to the two systems, and it's not quite clear where the damage is at this point. > I'm thinking of backing up /home and reinstalling. I'm thinking this may be the best way to go, reinstalling debian from scratch, after backing up userspace. The stable system I had doesn't boot to X any more either, though it still works in single-user mode. It's now just like testing, which I was using regularly. Unless -- maybe I just need to reinstall X. Is purging everything with "xorg" in the name sufficient? There seem to have been some residual files left around somewhere because it refused to remove one directory, but that may have resulted from my removing and restoring some configuration files incorrectly (crossing over inadvertently between systems) Maybe I should have emptied that directory by hand during the reinstall? (I think it may have been /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, but at this point I'm not sure) dselect will probably tell me what I have to install to get xorg and its friends back after an uninstall. But if I do reinstall from scratch, maybe it's also time to try out the new wheezy installer. Is it safe enough yet to use on a live system? Has it screwed up anyone's Windows system? I'm still stuck using Windows for Adobe's ebook copy protection. And Windows isn't as easy to reinstall as Linux. Curse Adobe for reneging on their promise to implement ADE for Linux. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Debian-eeepc-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-eeepc-devel
