How to recover X display?

[Matt Graham]

From: Josef Lowder <joe at actionline.com>
>On 3/23/09, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net> wrote:
>> USB drive, shirley? 
> When I plug in a flash stick into a USB drive, it no longer gets
> mounted now, so I cannot copy files to it.

Mount it manually, then.  Plug drive in, dmesg | tail to see which
device node it got assigned to, mkdir /mnt/usb , mount /dev/sd?1
/mnt/usb .  (It's not that you can't copy files to the disk, it's
that you don't know how to do it.)

>> This is an X problem IIRC.  The module being referred to is the X
>>  module, not a kernel module.  Did X get upgraded at some point? 
> As far as I can tell, "X" did not get upgraded or changed.

No scare quotes around X are necessary.  It's an abbreviation for 
the X11 Window System, which drives graphics cards and input
devices on Linux/*BSD systems.  You probably have an executable
called /usr/bin/X on your system.

> Tried editing out the line referring to "v4l" and rebooted, but
> that did not bring back "X"

No reboot was necessary.  Just restarting X should've showed you
if it had worked.  Did /var/log/Xorg.0.log change?  It
would be a good idea to post that file too, since there are
probably some things in there that would be useful to see.  The
whole file, not excerpts, even though 90% of the X log is usually
useless....

>>  grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
>>  lspci | grep VGA
> VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility

Right, so the xorg.conf grep should've showed either radeon or fglrx.
Those are the Free and proprietary X modules that drive those cards.

This is all very strange to me, since installing virtualbox shouldn't
have changed *anything* with the X config.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see