John, How about renameing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and rebooting. That way, if it is the settings in that file, you can get back to square one. Blank screen = square 0. You can then try making copies of xorg.conf with sections taken out to try and find the problem.
- Bill Morita wamorita At hevanet.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Jason Jordan Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 5:24 PM To: PLUG Subject: [PLUG] Now I've done it So I decided to reboot my new Debian testing installation after two days of tweaking stuff and installing applications. Sure enough, testing did it to me again. No window manager, no gnome-panel, just a blank screen. I can boot into recovery mode, but startx just gives me the same blank screen. I did read through dmesg, but I didn't see anything obvious. I saved the output of dmesg to ~/dmesg_11_22_2009. From recovery mode I can become root, and then startx gives me a full window with window manager and gnome-panel - but the mouse and keyboard are dead and I get a popup warning me "failed to initialize HAL." If I startx as jjj I get a window without metacity or gnome panel, but the USB mouse and keyboard work. Great choices, eh? Last time this happened right after installing Blueman. But this time I did not install Blueman, so it must be something else that has messed up the desktop. It could be any of hundreds of things. What am I supposed to do, reboot after every little change to make sure the change did not mess up the desktop? Is testing really this flakey? Last time I was able to right-click on the desktop and create a launcher to start a terminal. But this time right-clicking on the desktop does nothing. I am sending this from mydesktop computer. I thought I could get into my mail program by booting to a Karmic live CD on the laptop. The live CD mounted the testing drive all right. And it let me transfer the Mail folder to the live CD. But it won't let me transfer the ~/.sylpheed-2.0 file that has my mail accounts in it, not even from the command line as root. Strange that the live CD lets me read the mail folder but not the configuration file. What kind of security is that? Of course, I could also replace the new hard drive with the old Jaunty drive and boot to Jaunty. So here I sit all bummed. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
