On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:00:59 -0800
Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> dijo:
> 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.
But I have no extra monitors. :(
> 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.
No, not a problem. You missed a detail of my current saga. My Ubuntu
Jaunty hard drive was replaced with a brand new hard drive to install
Debian on. The old Jaunty hard drive is untouched. I can reinstall it
in the computer and in a few moments I am back in Jaunty-land. Yes, I
have possibly "lost" a couple days work installing Debian, assuming I
end up having to reinstall. But this saga is a learning experience for
me. The time spent was no more lost than the time spent taking a
linguistics course. I learn by the "clicky clicky, oh damn, clicky
clicky, whew!, clicky clicky, oh damn, clicky clicky, whew!" method
(tm).
> 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.
A live CD would probably work. I used a Karmic live CD and it wouldn't
let me copy some files. But that's the only live CD I tried. I have
Knoppix, Slax, and several rescue CDs in my library. I just didn't need
to go further because Rogan's suggestions got me up and running with
XFCE. Now I can fiddle with things in a full X environment. I'm
currently googling on the problem to see if I can find out what went
wrong and why, and how to fix it.
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