I also blew away my X setup when I upgraded from potato to woody so I know
how it feels. Here's some information I determined in the course of
fixing things:
Under potato you were using XFree86 release 3.3.+. Woody prefers to use
XFree86 release 4.0+. You can still use XFree release 3.3 in woody,
but you need the xserver-common-v3 compatibility package as well as your
xserver-<whatever> package. Another gotcha is that the method of choosing
the active X server changed. In potato, the active X server was listed in
the first line of the file /etc/X11/Xserver, but in woody the active X
server is whichever server binary is symlinked to /etc/X11/X. For XFree86
version 3 servers, the server configuration file is /etc/X11/XF86Config
while for version 4 servers it is /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. So to get your
system up, you would have to come up with a working configuration file v3
or v4 depending on which server you were going to run. With XFree86
version 4 all the servers are contained in one server in the package
xserver-xfree86.
When I have to repair this kind of problem, what I find convenient is to
disable the graphical login (gdm or xdm) by removing the execute
permission on the startup file. Then I log in to the console (as
root) and fiddle with the configuration file with an editor. When I have
something I want to try, I just do "startx". Then if it comes up, great,
I have a working system. If it doesn't, I kill the X screen with
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace if necessary and fiddle with it some
more. Sometimes it is useful to see the messages
that X spits out when it
starts up, so then I do: "startx >/tmp/xjunk 2>&1" Then after I bring X
down I can look at the file /tmp/xjunk and see what the error messages
were.
Eric Stern
