reconfiguration of installed system

[dep]

okay. after a multitude of truly bizarre efforts, i simply yanked the drive from the notebook, put it into the nearest-thing desktop machine that would boot from CD and installed. astonishingly, i ended up with something that boots. by dumping out of X to a virtual console, i was able to change the root password, so i can now login as root so i can try to configure the thing so that it will, among other things, run X.

i am familiar with non-debian distributions and their various configurators. i have no idea, though, how to do this in kubuntu from a terminal. X will not start. so. how might i bring about either hardware detection or a text-based configurator to do it manually?

thanks in advance.

[jankushka]

Re: reconfiguration of installed system

i guess you could have a go with:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

which basically forces the reconfiguration of the xserver-xorg package.
it will have to be run as root.

i don't know whether you're aware of the following or not, but fyi...
on *ubuntu systems, the root account is locked by default.
users can gain root privileges, through sudo, if they're members of the admin group.
this policy is controlled in /etc/sudoers.
now, you changed the root password.
that means you re-activated the root account.
which is something i always do myself, as well.
but it's just so that you know we deviate from the *ubuntu standard...

hth
cheers

[dep]

Re: reconfiguration of installed system

many thanks -- i'd just come back to say i'd discovered dpkg-reconfigure.

i appreciate the philosophy of keeping people from logging in as root, even as i avoid things that go too far to protect me from myself. a nice "are you crazy" warning from time to time is good.

but i gotta be able to have root access. now, to dive in and get some useful applications -- midnight commander, first off!

best,

dep

[Snowhog]

Re: reconfiguration of installed system

One just needs to be aware of the risk that they take when reactivating the root user account. While I too have objections to things that, by design, were put there to 'protect me from myself,' I actually appreciate what the *ubuntu Linux did by 'turning off' the root user account. When I need the privileges of root, I'm told so. Gaining those privileges to do the 'task at hand' is straight forward. In a console, it's either 'sudo [command]' or 'kdesu [command]' as appropriate. Many of the GUI apps available from the Desktop and K Menu, further allow running the app 'as root.' The protection afford to me, in this case, is one that I don't mind.

You are aware, yes, that from a console (non-root console) you can reconfigure the xserver with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

If when logging in at boot, you are not presented with the Desktop, you most likely have a problem with the identification of you video driver. This can be fixed by rerunning the command above, choosing not to detect you video driver automatically, and instead, choosing VESA. This will result in an xserver desktop. That done, you can begin the process of obtaining and/or reconfiguring xserver once you know/obtain the information/drivers for you video card/chip set.