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

[Robert Citek <robert.citek@gmail.com>]

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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