[SOLVED] LMDE/Gnome3 xorg.conf issue post UP5 upgrade
Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2012 9:58 pm
Last night, I tried to update/upgrade one of my systems with 1300+ packages, which, from all the reading I've been doing, I believe turned out to be UP5.
System: old Dell (single core CPU days), SATA drive, ATI Radeon HD video card. Nothing special.
This started life with Window$ XP, but when that died the slow M$ death, it got a new harddrive and Ubuntu. When that drive died, it was upgraded to LM 10 or 11, but then upgraded again to LMDE/Gnome2. With UP4, it got Gnome3 and a bunch of headaches until I got it working. All was good until UP5 last night.
Everything seemed to go well with the upgrade - I don't remember seeing anything bad going by as it updated things. But, when I rebooted, I got a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the upper left corner, and nothing else. I researched the issue the best I could on my other machine, and found that a "workaround" to get back to "usable" was to remove the xorg.conf file. That did work, but left me with the "fallback" configuration - no Gnome3 which my family has now become accustomed to seeing on this machine.
I've searched through the forums, but haven't found anything that has been able to help me with my situation. I think it is something with xorg.conf, but I don't know how to troubleshoot it. When I run the aticonfig --initial command, the base xorg.conf is created, and it is very similar to the one I had in place before UP5, just missing an "InputDevice" section with Generic Keyboard & kbd driver settings.
Looking at other posts, inxi seems to be something needed, so here are two of those:
I'm lost as to why this happened, and what to do to correct it. I did end up on the AMD support site, and downloaded and installed the latest ATI driver set: ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86_64.run, but I wonder whether that was appropriate, since I believe I'm still on 32 bit. I'm not beyond moving to MATE or Cinnamon, if that would be an easier path, but for some reason, the issue seems more to me like a system issue and not so much a DM issue.
System: old Dell (single core CPU days), SATA drive, ATI Radeon HD video card. Nothing special.
This started life with Window$ XP, but when that died the slow M$ death, it got a new harddrive and Ubuntu. When that drive died, it was upgraded to LM 10 or 11, but then upgraded again to LMDE/Gnome2. With UP4, it got Gnome3 and a bunch of headaches until I got it working. All was good until UP5 last night.
Everything seemed to go well with the upgrade - I don't remember seeing anything bad going by as it updated things. But, when I rebooted, I got a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the upper left corner, and nothing else. I researched the issue the best I could on my other machine, and found that a "workaround" to get back to "usable" was to remove the xorg.conf file. That did work, but left me with the "fallback" configuration - no Gnome3 which my family has now become accustomed to seeing on this machine.
I've searched through the forums, but haven't found anything that has been able to help me with my situation. I think it is something with xorg.conf, but I don't know how to troubleshoot it. When I run the aticonfig --initial command, the base xorg.conf is created, and it is very similar to the one I had in place before UP5, just missing an "InputDevice" section with Generic Keyboard & kbd driver settings.
Looking at other posts, inxi seems to be something needed, so here are two of those:
Code: Select all
inxi -SxxxGxF
System: Host mysystem Kernel 3.2.0-3-486 i686 (32 bit) Distro Linux Mint Debian Edition
CPU: Single core Intel Pentium 4 (-UP-) cache 1024 KB flags (nx sse sse2 sse3) bmips 5586.13 clocked at 2793.068 MHz
Graphics: Card Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV620 LE [Radeon HD 3450] X.Org 1.12.1.902 Res: 1280x1024@0.0hz
GLX Renderer N/A GLX Version N/A Direct Rendering N/A
Audio: Card-1 Intel 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller driver snd_intel8x0 at ports ec00 e8c0 BusID: 00:1e.2
Card-2 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV620 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 3400 Series] driver snd_hda_intel BusID: 01:00.1
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.24
Network: Card Intel 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ - PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller driver e100 v: 3.5.24-k2-NAPI at port ccc0 BusID: 03:08.0
Disks: HDD Total Size: 1080.2GB (7.4% used) 1: /dev/sda WDC_WD1002FAEX 1000.2GB
2: /dev/sdb WDC_WD800JD 80.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 25G used: 8.7G (37%) fs: rootfs ID:/ size: 25G used: 8.7G (37%) fs: ext4
ID:/home size: 400G used: 21G (6%) fs: ext4 ID:swap-1 size: 4.29GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Info: Processes 146 Uptime 42 min Memory 605.4/3040.9MB Runlevel 2 Client Shell inxi 1.4.23
Code: Select all
inxi -r
Repos: Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest/multimedia testing main non-free
Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opera.list
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free #Opera Browser (final releases)