Christopher: If you're ever stuck in X, to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop to Mingetty1.
Ctrl-Alt-F7 puts you back in X. glen On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 07:57:54PM -0500, Owens, Christopher wrote: > Hallelujah! > > Well, there's good news and a funny/sad story. Now I understand why friends > of mine said I probably knew enough about Linux to be dangerous. > > I am sending it all back to the list so the info will be searchable in the > archives. > > The good news is that several people wrote me to tell me to make a symlink > to /dev/psaux by doing 'ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse' and that worked. > Thanks to everyone who responded! > > The bad news is the last thing I had done before typing that was to change > the mouse setting in xf86config to 'Microsoft' instead of PS/2. That made > the mouse pointer behaves unpredictably when X finally started. Further bad > news comes in the form of settings I made at install time, telling it I > wanted a graphical login screen, and the fact that the window manager I > installed (Window Maker) doesn't understand keystrokes to move around the > screen. The icing on the cake was that, knowing I was not planning to > dual-boot, I eliminated the number of seconds LILO waits before starting to > boot. > > So on boot, I got a graphical login screen, and could log in, but it goes > directly to x-windows, where my Window Maker doesn't seem to understand any > keyboard commands, and my mouse pointer zips up to the upper left corner of > the screen and stays there. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even exit X > to reboot! I had to shut it down dirty. > > Since I am at work, I didn't have my rescue floppy handy, so I went and made > a copy of tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/), and while it was booting, I > looked up how to mount my hard drive. When I mounted it, mount warned me > that I ought to run e2fsck. When I ran e2fsck, it gave me a warning that > running it on a mounted filesystem might cause severe damage! > > This left me in a quandary. Should I access the drive while it was dirty? > Or risk the damage? Fortunately I finally realized that what e2fsck meant > for me to do was unmount the drive, then run e2fsck, then remount it. I did > so, and edited my XF86Config to put the right mouse (PS/2) back in. After > the reboot, I could use the mouse to exit xwindows! > > Next problem was getting rid of the graphical login screen I had specified > prematurely, xdm. After searching around on the net and on my hard drive I > determined what I needed to do was '/usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f xdm remove'. > > Finally X was working, but only in 640x480. My laptop is capable of 800x600 > resolution, so I went and found someone with the same laptop as I > (http://www.raster.com/950n/) who had posted their XF86Config. I copied it > into /etc/X11/, but starting X only resulted in a message saying that font > 'fixed' could not be found. Comparing the two files, I noticed that the > donor file had only one line of 'FontPath "unix/:-1"' but the working (at > low res) file had about 12 such lines each with specific font names. I cut > and pasted in the specific font names, removed the 'unix/:-1' line, and > tried again, and now it works. > > The most important lesson I learned is don't install xdm until you know X is > solid, if ever! > > Thanks again to those who helped! And if anyone needs to get potato running > on an old AST laptop, I know more than I used to about the process. > > Chris Owens > > -----Original Message----- > From: Owens, Christopher [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 1:38 PM > To: debian-laptop@lists.debian.org > Subject: Stupid newbie question: eraserhead-style mouse > > > Kind people, > > This is my first question to the list, and it is the first time I have tried > to install linux since the kernel was version 1.2. > > I have installed potato on an old laptop using http. The laptop is an AST > Ascentia 950n, and claims to have a P120, 16MB of RAM, and I have upgraded > the hard drive to a 5.7GB unit. I have net thanks to a PCMCIA network card. > > I think when I installed, I may have had the built-in mouse disabled. When > I try to start X now, I get an error that it can't open /dev/mouse, and, > indeed, there does not seem to be any /dev/mouse. X has never successfully > run on this system. > > Microsoft Mouse Driver version 8.20 works on a DOS boot floppy I have handy, > and the mouse is usable. > > How can I get a /dev/mouse? > > Thanks for any help. > > Chris Owens > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- Glen S Mehn Lead Systems Administrator SquareTrade, Inc [EMAIL PROTECTED] Building Trust in Transactions (sm)
