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

[Hendrik Boom]

On Sat, 26 May 2012 00:45:21 +0000, Hendrik Boom wrote:

> 
> 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
> varying combinations of root directory and /boot partition, things may
> have gotten truly borked.

This does seem to be the problem.  Looking carefully, I find that the 
last few testing kernels (exactly the ones that were causing me trouble) 
were paired off with the root file system from ,y installation of squeeze 
on the same machine.  The one that worked was properly paired off with 
the root file system from testing.  It's not clear to me why this 
happened, but it would adequately explain why I ended up with a kernel/
xorg mismatch.

Of course, in the course of trying to fix things, I ended up making 
changes inconsistently to the two systems, and it's not quite clear where 
the damage is at this point.

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

I'm thinking this may be the best way to go, reinstalling debian from 
scratch, after backing up userspace.  The stable system I had doesn't 
boot to X any more either, though it still works in single-user mode.  
It's now just like testing, which I was using regularly.

Unless -- maybe I just need to reinstall X.  Is purging everything with 
"xorg" in the name sufficient?  There seem to have been some residual 
files left around somewhere because it refused to remove one directory, 
but that may have resulted from my removing and restoring some 
configuration files incorrectly (crossing over inadvertently between 
systems)  Maybe I should have emptied that directory by hand during the 
reinstall?   (I think it may have been /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, but at this 
point I'm not sure)

dselect will probably tell me what I have to install to get xorg and its 
friends back after an uninstall.

But if I do reinstall from scratch, maybe it's also time to try out the 
new wheezy installer.  Is it safe enough yet to use on a live system?  
Has it screwed up anyone's Windows system?  I'm still stuck using Windows 
for Adobe's ebook copy protection.  And Windows isn't as easy to reinstall 
as Linux.  Curse Adobe for reneging on their promise to implement ADE for 
Linux.

-- hendrik