[PLUG] Cursor Only?

Richard Steffens rsteff at attbi.com
Mon Jul 29 20:48:41 UTC 2002


"Shannon C. Dealy" wrote:

> > Is there a keyboard combination that I can use to put me in some mode
> > that will let me recover from this? (Blank screen w/ mouse cursor)

> You don't really indicate the setup here, 

Sorry, and now I can't recall if I was logged in or not. However, I know
I was at least at the login screen provided by Gnome. I had been
switching between Gnome and KDE. Sometimes I was logged in as root, and
sometimes as a normal user. I don't generally leave the machine logged
in as root (general principles: avoiding a bad habit) so I'm pretty sure
that if I was logged in, it would have been as an ordinary user.

> but if the screen that you are
> on is your X display, you could try the <ctl><alt><F1> combination to
> switch you to a virtual console and fix the problem from there.

Thanks. That got me to a console screen and I was able to log in as
root. ps -ax didn't show any processes used by my ordinary user, so I'm
assuming that I wasn't logged in.

Now, what's the way to get back to X? I tried startx, but I got:

  Fatal server error:
  Server is already active for display 0
          If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
          and start again.

I probably shouldn't have done this next, but I tried removing
/tmp/.X0-lock and starting again and got:

  Fatal server error:
  Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure a X server isn't
already running

  Xlib: connection to "0.0" refused by server
  Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
  giving up
  xinit:  unable to connect to X server
  xinit:  No such process (errno 3):  Server error.

>From this I assume that X is running. ps -ax | grep X returns 9 lines
with -DHAVE_PROXY plus one line with:

  1882 ?     S     0:02 /etc/X11/X vt7 -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth :0

I killed 1882. The screen cleared, and I got a console login prompt. I
logged in as root, again, and ran startx. I now have the X cursor on a
cross-hatched background, but nothing else.

I tried <ctrl><alt><F1> and found some lines referencing NEOMAGIC,
mostly saing that it was "Not programming shadow registers."
 
I tried <ctrl><alt><F2> and found a login prompt. 

<ctrl><alt><F3> puts me in the console where I killed 1882.

<ctrl><alt><F4> is another login prompt, as are <ctrl><alt><F5>, and
<ctrl><alt><F6>.

<ctrl><alt><F7> is the cross-hatched background with the X cursor. 

<ctrl><alt><F8> is a blank screen with a blinking underscore cursor as
are <ctrl><alt><F9>, <ctrl><alt><F10>, <ctrl><alt><F11>, and
<ctrl><alt><F12>.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati"
http://rsteff.home.attbi.com/




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