On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 05:24:18PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 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?
A quick hack - see if something shows up on an external monitor. I
would give that a 10% chance of working, but if it does, you are
closer to finding a fix.
Laptop video drivers are "special", and one of the last things to
get fixed in a new release, so yes, they can be flakey. They are
depending on people like you to test them and fix them before the
release. Fortunately, there is always the option of booting off a
live CD and making copies of the various X files, folding them in
from backups, etc. Tricky but possible. That is why testers are
such stud muffins.
My first rule of computers is that anything I do not have two
copies of, I will someday have zero copies of. Hence, before I do
anything as radical as updating distros, I (1) make a backup, and
(2) make a drive image to an identical drive ( second drive bays
on thinkpads. Yay!). This has bitten me once - the thrashing
caused by copying my primary drive (using ddrescue) caused it to
fail. But I was able to rebuild from backups.
Hard drives are so damned cheap these days that I always buy two.
Since laptops almost always come with an OEM special-part-number
drive with Windoze on it, I run it just long enough to see the
splash screen, then replace the drive with a different new drive
for installing my Linux distro. I then put the original drive
in an antistatic bag, and store it for future reverse engineering
(after Microsoft gets hit by an asteroid). Once I have it set up
(and this can take hours) I make a drive copy. I make another
copy after a week or two of finishing tweaks.
But you didn't do that, and now you got troubles. I don't use
the newest versions of X, but I can often learn a lot by looking
at /var/log/X.org.0.log with a live CD. Yes, it is vast heaps
of gobbletygook, but the error messages are sometimes obvious.
You have a SATA drive in your laptop, IIRC. If even a live CD
won't work, another option is to get something like a Vantec
Nextar drive dock ("toaster"), and connect that to your desktop
(USB or eSATA) and look at the drive that way. I use the drive
toaster to hold my (swappable) backup drive. Again, the purpose
of this exercise is to see what X did or did not do.
And when you get it working again, make backups! Then you will
have a copy of a working X.org.0.log file, and you can look for
differences the next time you get stung.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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