[Techtalk] killed my xserver

[Maria McKinley]

Conor Daly wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 08:42:24AM -0800 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
> Maria McKinley thought:
>> Conor Daly wrote:
>>> I can't be much help but did you try as root:
>>>
>>> X -configure
>>>
>>> This should probe and generate a /root/xorg.conf.new or similar.  Then you
>>> run:
>>>
>>> X -xf86config=/root/xorg.conf.new
>>>
>>> to test (I can't remember the exact syntax there but the X -configure
>>> command should give you the correct command to run).  If it works, that
>>> should give you the standard grey screen with the 'X' cursor.
>>> <ctrl><alt><backspace> to kill that.
>>>
>>> Conor
>> Is this different than doing dpkg-reconfigure?
> 
> Dunno.  I'm not debian-literate, coming from an RH / fedora background.
>  From what I know about debian, I would have thought it would but you
> never know.
> 
> That said, your fonts problem may be the real issue...
> 
> Conor

Well, I think I have things working now, for the most part. Basically I 
just kept reconfiguring and installing until I got it to work. It wasn't 
entirely random, I was using hints from googling, but mostly it was very 
unsatisfying detective work, and I am not sure what finally did it. X 
has got to be one of the most frustrating things with linux. Almost as 
bad as trying to figure out networking on a windoze machine. ;-)

I do have a strange question, though. Normally I start x by doing 
/etc/init.d/gdm start. While troubleshooting, however, I was just doing 
startx. Well, once I had x working I didn't know how to kill it. I tried 
  a few different things, and finally managed to kill it, but now gdm 
won't start, because it thinks gdm is already running. There are no gdm 
or x processes running anymore. Any ideas how to convince gdm there it 
isn't running?

thanks,
maria