[PLUG] X is messed up

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Aug 27 20:14:12 UTC 2009


A month or so ago I asked here for suggestions as to why my bluetooth
mouse stopped working. It happened after our August general meeting. I
had tried to suspend (which never works because I can't restore). I
hadn't tried suspend for a long time, so I tried it again just to see
if perhaps some of the constant updates had fixed things. Suspend was
still broken, and the only way to restore was to use the power button
and restart. After restarting the mouse was dead and nothing I could do
would get it working again. However, bluetooth was working fine because
I can connect to my phone, and "hcitool scan" finds the mouse.

Drew suggested here that if bluetooth is working, then the problem must
be in X. So I switched from the nv driver to the nVidia driver and
restarted the computer. (Can't do Ctrl-alt-backspace on current
incarnations of Gnome.) When X came up the mouse was working. I
switched back to the nv driver and the mouse has continued to work.
That is, until this morning, when I discovered that overnight it died
again. Sadly, switching drivers did not restore it this time.
Otherwise, same symptoms - "hcitool scan" finds it, and "hcitool cc
<address> executes without error, but no mousie. I have another
bluetooth mouse and I get the same results with it.

There's more. Ever since that fateful night the desktop font (Sans, 9
pt) has been slightly messed up. The linespacing is too wide, and when
I type into a dialog box the text jumps down so the lower half of the
letters are cut off. Numerals also appear in various point sizes.
Changing to a different font does not help.

And still more. I now have occasional system lockups. Once the capslock
light was flashing, but usually it just quietly locks up - no mouse, no
keyboard. There are no messages in /var/log/messages. Also, Firefox
decides to crash about once a day, always when clicking on a link in a
web page. When I restart Firefox the same link works fine. Previously
Firefox was always rock solid.

So I conclude that something is messed up in X and it is causing all
these woes. I have decided that I should just reinstall X. But there is
my problem. Google cannot tell me what "X" actually consists of. It's
probably more than one package, but which ones? Also, what will happen
if I uninstall X from the GUI? Like, Synaptic sort of needs a GUI, so
I'm not sure the reinstall will work properly. I'm thinking I should do
the whole uninstall-reinstall from the command line after booting to
Recovery Mode. That means I need a paper list of packages. Or maybe
it's Gnome, not X. I don't actually know where X ends and Gnome starts. 

The system is sort of working, so before I do something and make things
worse I decided to ask for suggestions. Oh, and "reinstall Jaunty" is
not a good option. It would take days to get all my programs
reinstalled, some of which required tweaks that I don't even remember. 

Any brainstorms?



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