Re: help... X-Server crashed after update

[Laszlo Acs <laszlo@lanscape.net>]

Let me preface my retort with this.  I'm not a linux guru in any form or 
fashion; though I've had occasion to dabble often since RedHat 5 and have 
owned a number of machines fer quite some time as well as worked in a 
couple of environments where I convinced powers that having an Open-Source 
platform would be cost effective.  I've also been active in a few community 
stuff with the Pritchards and others - let's just say I ain't a raw 
recruit.  But, I tend to forget more than I remember these days (I've been 
around - in the arena since before the Commodore PET machines and built my 
own Heathkit S-100 bus 8086 computer "back in the day" and my first formal 
computer course was in Fortran where I had to punch cards to run what I 
created).  I've been around the block a few times...  Usually, I spend a 
massive amount of time creating what I want for the personal project of the 
moment, building a machine for a specific purpose - get it working and let 
it run, hardly ever messing with the machine much afterward. Sometimes it's 
months between times of playing on any *nix machine (my day job is all M$ 
and Winders-based - just the way it is) - and I normally have to play 
catch-up with what's passed me by when I have occasion to play again.  Sad 
to say, there simply ain't enuf hours in a day to accomodate all my work 
and family obligations as well as my playtime (and I try to stay abreast of 
the developments - I have too many interests in too many things [digital 
imaging, data-warehousing, clustering, Java, Perl, C++, Ruby, Ajax, Adobe 
Flex and AIR, web services...  just to name a few 'puter stuff, then 
there's interest and participation in things like playing the stock and 
options markets, being a Boy Scoutmaster, and an executive leader in a few 
other organizations]; stuff simply happen too quickly to stay completely on 
top of them all - and I try)...

So - if X is not running, then what's the difference anywho.  I've never 
had occasion to play in recovery mode, so don't have a clue other than what 
I read on daWeb and other research and making an inference to my experience 
of another OS's idea of a recovery mode.  My understanding of recovery mode 
apparently was wrong; but that's really besides the point.  Now that I'm 
enlightened a tad, I don't see how knowing this helps in any way.  More to 
my point of trying to be as non-destructive as possible - from what I could 
tell when booting; something got skrewed somehow during an update - which 
came AFTER something skrewed with my xfonts causing a PERL issue that 
aborted a different update.  My path of repair so far has been disastrous 
and my machine is barely limping along, but still functioning.  I can no 
longer remote into it; but I can remote to another machine in the same 
subnet and check it's status based on mounting files with another system - 
checking log files, etc.; can't remotely control the mySQL, but I can 
monitor it while I am away.  The machine has failed twice so far (locked up 
and unresponsive to any command) and both times, there is nothing in the 
log that indicates a reason for this problem.  I'm hesitant to comment out 
my CRON jobs; they still operate (at least until the machine freezes) just 
fine.

What would be more helpful is a suggestion or two of what I can do beyond 
this point.  I'm running out of bright ideas and all the ones I've had so 
far have not had nice results.  I've gone from smooth operation where all I 
ever done for ages was monitor my applications to not being able to read my 
gdm screen to death of my Xserver.  I'm having to learn all over again how 
to deal with mySQL and monitoring my machine using just the terminal... 
;)  Little did I know how spoiled I've become by the mouse and 
widgets...  I'm a little leery of my own ideas at this point - hence this 
and my previous notes hoping for a little assistance from the broader 
community.

humbly...
Laz

At 02:06 PM 4/15/2009 -0500, you wrote:
>Drastic?  Destructive?  In what way?
>
>"recovery mode" is just Ubuntu's way of saying "runlevel 1".  The only
>difference between "recovery mode" and other "modes" is the services
>that are started/stopped.  X11 (gdm/kdm/etc.) is just another service,
>which happens to start in normal mode and is not started in recovery
>mode.
>
>Regards,
>- Robert
>
>On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Laszlo Acs <laszlo@lanscape.net> wrote:
> > but...  I really didn't wanna do that.  I was hoping to solve the problem
> > without getting drastic (I consider 'recovery mode' to be rather 
> drastic and
> > potentially destructive if not VERY careful)
>
>-
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