On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 08:40:32PM -0800, Paul Harris wrote:
> After a while I stumbled upon the fact
> that I was still running v3. of X, rather than the 4 I had
> thought (can you tell I'm a newbie?)

Nope.  That's a tricky bit.  I'm still not entirely sure why my first
attempt at upgrading my workstation at home from X3 to X4 failed and
the second worked...

> Don't know if it's relevant, but ls -l ttyS* said that all
> four ports were dialout?

Debian assigns ownership of all local serial ports to group dialout
by default, presumably on the assumption that they're more likely to
be used for modems than anything else.

> My monitor clicks
> as it changes resolution, then a black screen.  And that's
> it.  No ctrl-alt-del, ctrl-alt-bksp, or (ctrl)-alt-F(1-7)
> has any effect, and I have to hard reboot.  But as I use KDM
> this takes me straight back to the same place.

If you've installed sshd and have another machine to connect from,
you may be able to ssh into the machine and work on it that way.
It's possible (particularly if you're using framebuffer or video
acceleration) that the machine is still working fine, but the video
subsystem has locked up.  If that's the case, you'll still have to
reboot to test new X configurations, but at least you'll be able to
do an orderly shutdown.

> I tried rescue from the debian setup disk, but this takes me
> to the same place (not what I was expecting).  So, any
> suggestions on how to get in to fix it, and what should I
> fix?!

Start up the setup disk, but tell it to go into setup mode instead of
booting to the existing installation.  When it comes to the first
screen after booting, hit alt-f2 to get another console, use it to
mount your normal root partition, and (assuming for the moment that
you mounted it under /mnt) edit /mnt/etc/init.d/kdm so that the first
non-comment line is "exit 0".  That will let you reboot your system
without starting X.

-- 
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius

Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss