[NBLUG/talk] Housecall in Novato needed!

Bill Kendrick nbs at sonic.net
Thu Aug 19 15:52:17 PDT 2004


My dad's Linux box (Debian Woody running KDE 3 backports) seems to be
broken. :^(

KDM starts up just fine, but when he goes to login, the screen blanks,
and then the KDM login screen reappears.

I had him make sure the 'session' type was still KDE, and also give
'failsafe' a try, but neither worked.  I had him try logging in to
a second X server with "startx -- :1", and he noticed some errors
go by ("EE" lines).  (I also had him do "/etc/init.d/kdm stop" and
plain "startx", but that failed, too.)

Unfortunately, I was doing this all over the phone, and I'm currently
in Mountain View, so it's a little hard to help out.  I was hoping someone
a little closer might be available to help him out, first-hand.
(He needs to get to some email (in Kmail) soon!)


To the best of my knowledge, based on what he could read over the phone,
the error lines are something like:

  xf860penserial - cannot open device: /dev/input/mice: no such file
  or directory

  Generic Mouse: cannot open input device

  PreInit failed for input device "Generic Mouse"


What's odd is he said the mouse worked just fine on the KDM screen
(that's how he was able to get to the "Sessions" menu in the login window).

So I'm guessing it's something that might need a little more careful
examination.  (The machine had been humming along for months and months,
with no intervention or admin. from your's truly.  A fact I've been quite
proud of. :^)  Good ol' Linux, Debian, KDE!  What a combo!)

He did mention one day the machine didn't seem to shut down properly.
(It SOUNDS like he may have chose "Logout" instead of "Shut down" in the
KDE logout pop-up window, which may have then blanked on a screensaver,
at which point he thought it had shut down.  So maybe some file or
device got corrupted in there somewhere...)


He'll be home all evening, and is located just off 101 in the north part of
Novato.  If you think you can help out, drop me a private email and I'll
give you his home phone number.

Thanks and good luck!

-bill!




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