debian + xorg = whitescreen !

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 08:46:16PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> 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.

Well x.org only very recently entered debian unstable, and not even
complete at first.  I am not sure if all of it has made it in yet.  In
addition the current transition to gcc 4.0 and the c++ abi v2 that goes
with that is making a lovely mess of everything.  From what I have read
on the mailing lists it looks like they expect a week or two for things
to get back to normal, and in the mean time kde, x.org and most c++
things will be partially or entirely broken in many cases.

This is what happens when a release comes out and a bunch of new stuff
all comes dumping in at the same time.  Fun fun.  Hopefully things will
all work out in the end.

The control+alt+f# problem was mentioned on some of the mailing lists in
the last week along with a work around/config change as far as I remember.

Lennart Sorensen
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