[PLUG] Now I've done it

[John Jason Jordan]

So I decided to reboot my new Debian testing installation after two
days of tweaking stuff and installing applications. Sure enough,
testing did it to me again. No window manager, no gnome-panel, just a
blank screen.

I can boot into recovery mode, but startx just gives me the same blank
screen. I did read through dmesg, but I didn't see anything obvious. I
saved the output of dmesg to ~/dmesg_11_22_2009. From recovery mode I
can become root, and then startx gives me a full window with window
manager and gnome-panel - but the mouse and keyboard are dead and I get
a popup warning me "failed to initialize HAL." If I startx as jjj I get
a window without metacity or gnome panel, but the USB mouse and
keyboard work. Great choices, eh?

Last time this happened right after installing Blueman. But this time I
did not install Blueman, so it must be something else that has messed
up the desktop. It could be any of hundreds of things. What am I
supposed to do, reboot after every little change to make sure the
change did not mess up the desktop? Is testing really this flakey?

Last time I was able to right-click on the desktop and create a
launcher to start a terminal. But this time right-clicking on the
desktop does nothing. 

I am sending this from mydesktop computer. I thought I could get into
my mail program by booting to a Karmic live CD on the laptop. The live
CD mounted the testing drive all right. And it let me transfer the Mail
folder to the live CD. But it won't let me transfer the ~/.sylpheed-2.0
file that has my mail accounts in it, not even from the command line as
root. Strange that the live CD lets me read the mail folder but not the
configuration file. What kind of security is that? Of course, I could
also replace the new hard drive with the old Jaunty drive and boot to
Jaunty. 

So here I sit all bummed.