We had a little power outage last night so when I came down this morning, the computer was, naturally, off. Turn it on, wait for boot process to complete only to see the wonderful words:
Attempting to enter rescue mode
error: the symbol ‘grub_xputs’ not found
grub rescue>
Lovely way to start the weekend.
Oh for F!@#$%’s sake.
Another update to the xserver and my touchpad is broken. After googling for about 10 minutes, I come up with this thread from just a few days ago. Apparently udev configuration is out and the xorg.conf is back in.
This is definitely a weak point in open source stuff. Changes like this should be documented better or some kind of warning or explanation that current configuration techniques are about to be broken should be available.
I suppose this is what I get for using the ‘testing’ distro.
UPDATE:
Here’s the relevant section to add to xorg.conf:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Synaptics"
driver "synaptics"
MatchProduct "ETPS/2"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event9"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.05"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "2"
Option "TapButton3" "3"
EndSection
See the InputClass section of the xorg.conf man page.
UPDATE II:
The two Match lines can be replaced with a MatchIsTouchpad "1" line. I don’t know if this is better or not- but it seems like it might be preferrable since InputClass sections are applied to anything that matches according to the man page. At least it’s limited to touchpads this way.
I’ve got apt-mirror setup here to serve updates for my debian based computers here at home. The update script hasn’t downloaded an update for AMD64 squeeze or my EEE laptop for almost a week. I’ve done sanity checks as well by swapping out my sources.list file to pull directly from the debian servers and I get the same result. Very odd for that amount of time to pass with no updates.
I’m assuming that ‘squeeze’ is in the process of being frozen and this has also temporarily frozen the ‘testing’ repo. I actually pull updates from ‘testing’ as opposed to ‘squeeze’ so I’m a little surprised that I’m affected. More than likely this is a consequence of my ignorance regarding the actual management of the repos. I haven’t seen any announcements regarding freezing the current testing code, so that’s my main cause for confusion.
Hopefully we get back to normally scheduled updating soon.
UPDATE: Apparently a main server has failed so updates are frozen for the time being. Thanks to Willian in the comments.
UPDATE 4/4/10: Cool beans- repo’s available again. Back to regularly scheduled updating.
For whatever reason, xpdf has disappeared from the Debian testing repository. It’s a nuisance since it seems to be the best combination of fast and usable among the various non-adobe pdf readers. It appears that a version has been reintroduced to sid, but it’s been awhile now and I wanted a working pdf reader.
So I opted to build it from source.