[Techtalk] killed my xserver

[Maria McKinley]

Maria McKinley wrote:
> 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?
> 

Oh, good grief. I just did /etc/init.d/gdm restart. Why I couldn't 
achieve the same thing doing /etc/init.d/gdm stop followed by 
/etc/init.d/gdm start is really beyond me, but there you go...

Problems solved, and remind me not to upgrade anything with an x in it 
anytime in the near future.

thanks,
maria