debian + xorg = whitescreen !

[Peter King]

Today xorg packages hit Debian unstable; I had been using the 
prerelease version without a hitch for a week or two, and so I
decided to switch over on my laptop (Sharp Actius A290). 

To make a long story short: it didn't work, although the earlier
prerelease had, and it failed in a variety of ways, some rather
spectacular. First xorg complained that it couldn't use the
old xorg.conf file from the prerelease. I deleted that and ran
Xorg -configure, which tanked with an error message that there
were no drivers available, presumably video drivers. Nonsense;
the laptop has a standard Trident Cyber9525dvd chip. Well, this
time I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, and tried again. And
hit a brick wall.

Now the xserver runs, and gives me a pure white screen with the
"x" cursor. I know there's a window manager running underneath
because the cursor changes shapes as it passes over the whiteout
windows... but ctl+alt+F1 etc. result in screen hash and won't
go away without a hard reboot, and there is no way I've found
to get the white screen licked. The lcd resolution is the usual
1024x768, and that's the only entry in the configuration section.

There is no indication of a problem in the Xorg.log.0 file; as
far as Xorg can tell everything is just fine.

I've tried commenting out DRI, FBdev, in all combinations. No good.
Likewise booting at different screen depths via startx -- -depth XX.

Any ideas?

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
215 Huron Street
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-3788 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5S 1A1
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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