"unable to open X server"
 

This evening I updated my Debian sid from 2.6.17-2-686 to 2-6-21-1-686.

After that, the KDE GUI won't start - I get the message "unable to open X server".

In the past, typing xstart or kde or kdm at this point would get things going. Not this time. I've Googled for a couple of hours, and found lashings of stuff (much from 2003 and earlier), but nothing that helps.

An oddity: 'aptitude update' starts a load of references to Linux 3.1 r1 _Sarge_ which was, long ago, the original installation.

'aptitude upgrade' (my last resort as a non-expert) brings the response
dirmngr: Depends: libpth20 (>= 2.0.7-2) but it is not installable
gnupg-agent: same
gpgsm: same

Can anyone suggest a cure that will get the X server back online?

What's the contents of your sources.list file? Make sure to change all references to Sarge or Etch to Sid (and Stable, Testing -> Unstable) Update and try again.

Thanks! Yes, it mentioned the original Deb 3.1 Sarge CDs, now commented out.

It then downloaded a load of extra stuff to update, but crashed out on the upgrade with the error message:

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libpth20_2.0.7-8_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/libpth.so.20.0.27', which is also in package libpth2
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libpth20_2.0.7-8_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

startx got a bit further, but still crashed - with a

Fatal server error: failed to initialise core devices
X10: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I've been here before - but it was a year or so ago and I can't find my notebook with what I did that time :(

apt-get remove --purge libpth2

apt-get install -f

apt-get upgrade

dpkg -i --force-all /var/cache/apt/archives/libpth20_2.0.7-8_i386.deb
dpkg --configure -a

Anything interesting in: grep "EE" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Try the -f option. Just aptitude -f (or --force). This forces aptitude to solve the dependency with the best possible (or least troublesome) solution.

Thanks, but no change. Same error messages about libpth blah blah.

It told me it was doing stuff because it was forced.
At the end, it came back to the non-GUI # prompt.
"startx" gave the same result - including a message about
No Input driver matching 'keyboard'
No core keyboard.

Odd, because the keyboard works fine in command-line mode, and was fine before...

Yes -

(II) Loading extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
(EE) Failed to load module "keyboard" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) No Input driver matching "keyboard"

I wonder where my keyboard has gone...

Yes, been doing that. No effect :( I think the problem's more than apt-get knows how to cope with.

Look for line like this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf :
Change "keyboard" to "kbd" as above. Try starting X again and see if it spits out any errors in the log file again.

Banzai!

Debian Sid is back - many thanks!

There's some configuring to do, but the beast is up and running.

No problem, glad you got it sorted out.