[Debian-eeepc-devel] I've been having trouble booting wheezy on my ASUS 1000HE.

[Hendrik Boom]

On Fri, 25 May 2012 09:50:06 -0300, Ben Armstrong wrote:

> On 05/25/2012 09:26 AM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
>> How do I find out whether I'm disabling KMS?  There seems to be no
>> mentino of KMS in my static boot stanzas (I'm using old grub 1):
>> 
>> for the current kernel, that fails:
> 
> It wouldn't necessarily be in grub. Check /etc/modprobe.d/ and make sure
> you don't have anything that turns modeset *off*.

Didn't find anything there.  But then, I'm not sure what I should be 
looking for.

> 
>> Indeed, I was.  Not I have it, but there's no improvement.
> 
> Sounds like you have an xorg.conf that explicitly uses the wrong input
> driver(s) then. Please check xorg.conf (and/or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*).
> 
>>> I'm not sure why the problems appear to you be related to the kernel.
>> 
>> Because booting an old kernel works, whereas a new one doesn't.
> 
> This is not what I meant. I understand what you are observing, I'm not
> sure why what is to me almost certainly Xorg-related masquerades as a
> kernel problem (but what I said below probably has something to do with
> it).
> 
>>> It
>>> sounds to me much more likely that they are Xorg-related. That being
>>> said, modern Xorg and kernel work in close concert with each other so
>>> that a mismatch in versions and/or packages installed can lead to
>>> strange behaviours such as you reported.
>> 
>> I regularly do aptitude safe-upgrade.  I'm worried that the regularly
>> upgraded xorg will stop working with the kernel that I'm actually
>> using.
> 
> In fact, you ought to be able to get away without any xorg.conf now. It
> may just be that you had stuff in there that worked back when kernel +
> Xorg used different drivers, but now don't work with new kernel +
> drivers.

I tried removing xorg, and not the old reliable kernel wouldn't let me 
log in, either, though it's using a different display manager.
But I seems to have screwed someting up, and moving the xorg files back 
didn't seem to work.

I subsequently decided to use aptitude to purge xorg and all its ilk, and 
then to reinstall them.

No improvement.

why, oh why does the choice of kernel determine the display manager.  
Possibly something worse is screwed up.  Possibly my menu.lst is giving 
me a different root directory?  I'll have to check.  If I've been boting 
variying combinatinos of root directory and /boot partition, things may 
have gotten tryly borked.

I'm thinking of backing up /home and reinstalling.

> 
>> I suppose I should try a single-user boot sometime.  See if the
>> keyboard is still unresponsive without X.
> 
> Given that I had exactly the same problem myself (and found it was
> because I hadn't observed when an upgrade removed -evdev ... oops!) and
> it was fixed by installing -evdev (and in your case, should be
> accompanied by a review of xorg.conf) I am strongly betting you will
> find it works fine without X.

It didn't seem to.  But given that something went wrong when I tried 
restring xorg.conf, something might also have gone wrong when removing it 
without me noticing.

-- hendrik