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

[Laszlo Acs <laszlo@lanscape.net>]

tasksel won't help in this case - it's not installed and will not install 
as long as my fonts are skrewed...

At 05:38 PM 4/15/2009 -0500, you wrote:
>As Douglas Adams would write: don't panic.  Things probably aren't as
>bad as they seem.  My guess is that the deb database got messed up
>somehow.  The trick now is to fix it and the messed up packages.
>
>On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Laszlo Acs <laszlo@lanscape.net> wrote:
> > 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
>
>OK.  Familiarity with Red Hat is good.  Red Hat and its successors all
>use the runlevel model.  Ubuntu did too up until recently.  Ubuntu now
>uses an event-driven model, but still maintains compatibility with the
>runlevel model so that you can run commands like telinit and runlevel,
>and it still has files in /etc/init.d/
>
> > 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.
>
>The first thing I would do is make a backup.  This gives you a safety
>net just in case something goes wrong and it allows you to me more
>willing to try things out that may be helpful but risky.  My personal
>preference for backing up is to clone drives by booting from a Live
>CD, but feel free to use whatever you are comfortable with.  Just be
>sure that you can restore from the backup in case you need it.
>
>Then I would boot into recovery mode and disable X11 from starting.
>The simplest way would be "mv /etc/init.d/gdm /etc/init.d/gdm.orig".
>Adjust the filename to whatever login manager you have.  Then exit
>from recovery mode.  X should no longer start, but everything else
>should still be fine (networking, databases, other services), assuming
>only X11 got messed up.
>
>After that it's a matter of poking around and experimenting and
>jumping between runlevels using telinit.
>
>The worst-case scenario is that you have flaky hardware and that you
>have to restore your backup to a new machine.  The penultimate
>worst-case is that you have to completely uninstall X11 and then
>reinstall it, which isn't as bad as it sounds (see 'man tasksel')
>
>Hope this helps.  Let us know how things go or if you have questions.
>
>Regards,
>- Robert
>
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