KDM fails after upgrade

[misplacedwilder]

Being the risk-taker that I am, I installed the upgrade from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon beta last night using the tool and the recommended steps. All went well, until reboot...

Everything seems to successfully boot -- except for KDM. I end up having to log in on the F1 terminal (sorry, don't know the correct terminology). I can then killall kdm, and restart kdm. It flashes the screen, and then gives me the following message, all by itself, on my screen:

DM-RX550GU2-256.

The F7 terminal (where I'd expect to see X and KDM running), is black except for the single white cursor, which seems to be a symptom of other problems elsewhere. I've never heard of this DM-RX550GU2-256 thing before though, and I can't seem to find anything about it (yet).

I've tried running in recovery mode. Again, it shows no errors during the boot process. It seems like my problem is entirely with KDM.

Any suggestions? At this moment, I'd just like my computer to run again, and would be happy to return to Fawn for a while. I'd rather not do a clean install, since I have a VirtualBox machine running WindowsXP, and I dread going through the steps of installing it again (especially fearful it won't activate again).

In short: Is there a command line method to reinstall a stable version of kubuntu's kdm packages? If so, what might they be? And lastly, any clue what may have gone wrong?

Thanks!

~Wilder

[misplacedwilder]

Re: KDM fails after upgrade

I've been reading through the other posts, and maybe I'm over-thinking this. This is likely X crashing because of the restricted driver problem discussed elsewhere... At least, I hope so. I'll try the solutions suggested when I get home from work and update. If anyone has another possibility in mind, I'd certainly like to hear.

[dibl]

Re: KDM fails after upgrade

Errrrk -- looks like a mess!

From the number of similar posts in the past couple of days, I'm thinking "upgrading" to Gutsy Beta is more like "degrading" your Feisty system! :P

I installed my Gutsy Tribe 5 from CD as a fresh install, and the Restricted Driver Manager was buggy then -- it automatically blew out my nvidia-glx-new package and substituted the older nvidia-glx package, which was wrong for my card, so I knew there were problems with it and turned it off.

I don't know if you were to apt-get install the kubuntu-desktop package if that would pull in the KDM pieces again, or not. It doesn't sound like you have a lot to lose by trying it. I've never seen the error message that you posted -- I've no clue about that.

At this point, I guess I'd be burning a Gutsy Beta Alternate Install CD and planning to start clean .... sorry!

[misplacedwilder]

Re: KDM fails after upgrade

Yeah, I'm very much hoping this is actually an X-related / videocard-related problem, especially since, now that I think about it, KDM isn't throwing any errors, and it's receiving kill and start commands just fine. I'll tinker with the X configuration and try some of the driver tricks elsewhere on this forum.

If that fails, I'm certainly going to try the kubuntu-desktop installation idea. I can never remember the apt-get package names. Thanks.

And, should it all prove fruitless, I'm already downloading a fresh ISO here at work. Hopefully I can get in there and surgically extract my virtual disks and their configuration files, and put them someplace safe. Luckily, they're really the only "personal" data that I don't keep protected on another partition... I guess I've learned to change that practice too.

~Wilder

[misplacedwilder]

Re: KDM fails after upgrade

No surprises here. This has everything to do with my two ATI graphics cards. While I was able to get them both up as a duel-monitor system on Feisty Fawn, no amount of tinkering will bring them both to life on Gutsy. And now that I've narrowed it down, I've been able to find others with similar problems (but no solutions) elsewhere on the web. By the way, I tested, and it effects both Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Should I come across a solution, I will post it here. I will also look into filing or confirming a bug.

For now, it's back to Feisty. Here's to hoping they get it ironed out. I'd hate to be locked out of an upgrade... maybe it's time to ditch the ATI cards ... even though they're relatively new...

~Wilder

[LordKhain]

Re: KDM fails after upgrade

Hi everyone!!

I had similar problems with the restricted "fglrx" driver, and it was of some help resotring /etc/X11/xorg.conf with a backup file I had of the old Feisty settings and booting Gutsy with it.

The reboot worked, X started. I re-enabled restricted drivers and finally they seemed to work. At present they are a bit slow and poor performancing, but I have still to investigate...