[H-GEN] Help - lost my X-server

[Bradley Marshall]

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On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 05:14:04PM +1000, David wrote:
> I hope this is the right address, even, because I've lost access to all the
> details...  :-(

You can't get to http://www.humbug.org.au/ ?

> All was working fine, then, when trying to get dual monitors working:
> d/l and install yanc
> d/l and try to install NVIDIA drivers (*kernel* and *GTX*?) sorry forget the
> names exactly. But the install of the kernel section failed when doing make
> install. Discontinued.

This has probably changed some settings or libraries, which
means there could be some issues trying to get things working
again unless you uninstall it.  Stopping something half way
through and not tidying it up is a good way to break stuff.

> I could still use the machine ok, but when I tried to use VMWare it
> complained that the monitor details were "Unavailable?". I re-ran the config
> perl script and it came up again. I figured everything was fine for now
> until I got more details about the NVIDIA driver installation.

Once you've changed the underlying libraries, you won't really
know if things are working until you restart X.

> I'd been wanting to get Korean input working for a while and finally found
> some instructions. I ran localedrake and chose Korean, which requested a
> logout/in, which I did. X failed to start. This is also the first time I've
> logged out/in since updating the VMWare config, so I'm not sure what has
> caused this.

The aforementioned drivers install probably did.

> I know precious little about how this works, being a Linux newbie (office
> friend configured it up the first time, but he's away on hols  :-( I swapped
> XF86Config-4 and XF86Config-4.old to see if that would help, but didn't.
> When I issue startx I get a blue screen, a wait cursor, and then it drops
> back out to a command prompt. There is some error about execve and err 3?
> Not sure.

Without these error messages, there isn't much that we can do to help you.
If you can tell us what the error messages are, there might be a chance we
can help fix the problem.  Otherwise, your best bet would be try to remove
the failed libraries and go back to an old working configuration.

> Sorry about the vagaries (and the long post). Is there some default config
> or fix that I can apply to get me back to an operational X server?

X configration is highly dependant on the graphics card and
monitor, so unlikely to get it running at any reasonable
resolution with a default config.

You might also want to take the time to read
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html.
These will help you to ask questions in such a way that we
can help you quicker.

Thanks,
Brad

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