Hello
Andrew Borland (<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) wrote:
> 1) Can anybody suggest any obvious reasons why I was not offered any
> of the X setup screens during the original installation?
By default, Debian will not install XFree. You can however select it at
the end of the installation via dselect or tasksel.
> Following advice read elsewhere on this list, I attempted:
> dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
>
> but this complained about X not being fully installed - not that I'd
> seen any message to this effect during base installation. I'd have
> expected a fairly prominent warning about something as fundamental as
> X not installing.
It is default behaviour to not attemp to install XFree, so of course you
did not get any warnings.
> So, in accordance with further instructions on this list, I installed
> X manually:
> apt-get install xserver-xfree86 followed by
> apt-get install kdm
> (not sure if kdm was essential but it was recommended)
kdm is the KDE login manager. It is not essential, but quite useful.
You maybe want to install the x-window-system or x-window-system-core
meta package to make sure you get a working graphical environment with
all necessary components.
> After that, when I rebooted, KDE started but I couldn't do anything
> with it. The mouse couldn't get more than about an inch away from the
> bottom left hand corner and none of the keyboard shortcuts listed at
> kde.org were being actioned.
Maybe some configuration problem with XFree. Also, make sure the
necessary KDE components are installed. At lease you need the kdebase
package (which probably is installed because of kdm), but maybe you
want the kde meta package as well.
> 2) When faced with such a fatal problem in X, how does one persuade
> Debian to boot to a console display given that you obviously can't
> edit any of the configuration files.
By default, runlevels 2-5 on Debian are the same. So I would start in
single user mode (if you use lilo, type "Linux init s" at the boot
prompt.
> 3) I played with Mandrake a couple of years ago, and I seem to recall
> there being separate entries in LILO for KDE or TEXT sessions, can
> anything similar be achieved in Debian? I think it was something to
> do with runlevels.
Remove the start link for the login manager from one of the runlevel
directories /etc/rc?.d (where ? is 2,3,4,5). Then you can boot into
that runlevel to start without X.
[...]
> 5) Unrelated to the foregoing, is there an apt-get command (or any
> other command) that basically says "go and get all the security
> patches applicable to anything I've got installed" such that I can
> keep the system up to date?
If the security server is in your sources.list, use
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
to upgrade to the latest availabke versions of installed packages.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
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Andreas Janssen
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Registered Linux User #267976
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