So, I botched the upgrade to udev-191. I thought I'd followed the steps, but I apparently only covered them for one machine, not both.
The news item instructions specified that I had to remove udev-postmount from my runlevels. I didn't have udev-postmount in my runlevels, so I didn't remove it. Turns out, that dictum also applies to udev-mount. So after removing that[1], I was able to at least boot again. Udev also complained about DEVTMPFS not being enabled in the kernel.[2] I couldn't get into X, but I could log in via getty and a plain old vt, so I enabled it, rebuilt the kernel, installed it and rebooted...and now that's presumably covered. I'm now able to get into X, but when I try to run an xterm, it fails. Checking ~/.xsession_errors, I find: xterm: Error 32, error 2: No such file or directory Reason: get_pty: not enough ptys I find this bizarre, as I'd never had any trouble with xterm in this way before. What'd I do wrong, and how do I recover? I don't trust emerging at this point; I tried re-emerging udev, and I aborted after I saw an stderr line about failing to open a pty, even though portage does quiet builds for parallel building by default...so I doubt whatever emitted that line on stderr was being properly guarded against the failure. [1] I didn't have a boot cd or similar to work with, so I used the old init=/bin/sh trick on the command line. That was functional. And then I tried init=/usr/bin/vim, and things got real. :) [2] Sparking a bemused discussion with a friend at tonight's LUG meeting over the devfs->udev->udev+devtmpfs progression, but that's a different story. -- :wq
