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Keith Abraham wrote:
Can anyone suggest some good webpages/books etc on troubleshooting xservers and GUIs. For various reasons in the past year I've had periods of up to 3 months between system updates on my Debian system. After an update I've often lost the GUI and been dropped into terminal mode
Not sure on reference material, troubleshooting is troubleshooting. Polya's "How to Solve it" (computing is just mathematics at least whilst you avoid hardware problems) ? Almost be definition troubleshooting isn't documented, but the usual procedures apply, read the log files, check the usual suspects, find some good key words, and search the net etc. Handy to know how to use Lynx if this is your main desktop that is playing up.
Certainly running out of disk space in the root filesystem is a common cause of login problems after an upgrade. Particularly if you are behind on updates, as it caches them in /var/cache somewhere.
I've fallen foul of this a couple of times, once since tracking unstable I went away for a week, and came back to find umpteen hundred megabytes of shiny new free software just waiting for me to okay the install. I've made my root filesystem too small, and because it is all hideous complex RAID I don't fancy the reinstall just yet..... Although the machine is getting to that point where a reinstall might be sensible. You know the tenth time you install Apache on an unstable box just to try some other weird and wonderful CMS system..... Perhaps I should have used my laptop more for that sort of thing, as it is sacrificial. Still it is basically together and working inspite of my abuse of it, never seen an OS like this Debian stuff. Nothing has ever lasted this long at my hands without a reinstall....
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