N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Hi,

I am looking for some advice on the best way to proceed from a situation I have cleverly (sarcasm) managed to get myself in. After messing around some, I have managed to get my N800 in a state where the GUI will no longer load. On a power up, the loading status bar along the bottom of the screen will progress to the right edge of the screen but then nothing further happens. I can SSH into the device so it is still alive. Looking at the dmesg output does not show anything obvious (to me) as to what the problem may be.

How I got here:

- enabled R&D mode
- enabled Red Pill mode
- set up ssh (thank goodness)
- upgraded a whole lot of applications/libraries that became available after enabling Red Pill.

I think I have two options here and I am not sure what the best one is so I would appreciate some advice from the community (although I am sure you are all smart enough not to get yourself into this sort of situation ;-).

Option 1 - reflash the latest OS. My concern here is that whatever is messing up the GUI may still be active on the device after the reflash and then because of the reflash I will have lost SSH access to the device and any possibility of doing anything else to address the issue.

Option 2 - using the SSH connection and apt try to selectively uninstall/downgrade things until the device may come alive again. My concern is that I do not know what is causing the problem so it is pretty much a shot in the dark as far as what to uninstall/downgrade/whatever in order to try and address the situation. Quite likely I will get myself in a situation of no return ....

Any advice that anyone could offer me would be appreciated. Right now I am leaning towards the reflash option as likely the one with the best probability of saving my nether regions ....

TIA ...

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

There's your problem and there's your solution.

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

zerojay, thanks for the response.

Not sure I what understand what you mean here,

but this sounds like a vote for the reflash solution.

Cheers,
Kris

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

I had the same symptom when I cleverly (not) put "sudo gainroot" in my .profile. Something to do with starting up the GUI must be done as normal user - and it's a terrible idea anyway.

So if you've done that, or else something else which changes the nature of your shell, try undoing it!

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Unfortunately this seemed to coincide with the massive package upgrade I did rather than the root access stuff. It was booting cleanly after I got ssh installed and functional. It was when I updated the list of upgradable packages and got caught by the "ooo .. new and shiny" trap that things went sour.

That said, I'll have a look at what is in my .profile while I still have the SSH connection before reflashing ...

Thanks,
Kris

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

A reflash will wipe everything on the internal flash and leave you with a clean slate. If a reflash doesn't fix something it would point strongly to the problem being a hardware issue (which is probably not the case here) or maybe something with the bootloader (again, obviously not the case here). Also, be wary of magic::sys or whatever it's called while in red pill mode. Trying to upgrade that is asking for trouble from what I've heard. If you do manage to figure out what went wrong before you reflash do tell us though. I'm curious. :)

-John

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Excellent - just the sort of information I was looking for. I was somewhat worried that the reflash would not be an "entirely" clean slate.


Ooops - that is one of the things I did try and upgrade. The upgrade failed and then it subsequently refused to upgrade (can't remember the exact message though). Sounds like I am the master of my own demise - although I knew that anyway!!

Thanks

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Well - it's back alive and squeaky clean after a reflash. So before I commit too much in configuration time, I am going to quickly get it into Red Pill mode again and then try installing magic::sys and see what happens. If I can add some "don't do that!!" input to the community I'll be really happy. If you are interested in a good example check this out:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/EraseAll

My .profile for both root and user looked clean (actually the one for user didn't even exist). The root .profile only had standard skeleton looking stuff (but it did look more like a bash skeleton to me - I have no experience with ash so I don't know how similar they are).

Thanks everyone for all the help and I will keep the forum posted on my progress (or potentially lack of .. but that is also a learning experience ;-)

Cheers,
Kris

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Okay, after the reflash I immediately enabled Red Pill and updated the application list. The only app available to upgrade was magic::sys so I went ahead. The upgrade failed (error message escapes me right now - I really have to start writing things down). A subsequent attempt to upgrade the package also failed. Performed a reboot on the N800 and the GUI loaded up with no problems and everything seemed normal.

Next step - reflash, enable R&D mode, enable Red Pill and then try upgrading magic::sys and see what happens ... Oh yeah, and take notes this time.

Cheers,
Kris

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

I've read and re-read the thread but I'm still scratching my head as to why you want to go red pill and upgrade whatever it is you want upgraded..

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Right now I am just trying to characterize what went wrong in the first place. I did a number of things in a short period of time and would like to figure out what "broke" the GUI. I figure that the time to play around is now seeing as I have reflashed and lost any custom configuration anyway ....

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Ah I think I ran into same problems as you, 5 days after having bought this nice n800.
I also updated a few stuffs, in particular magic:sys.. I've always like magic :D
So there must be something broken during the upgrade.
As I have no root access, will be even harder.
If you get an idea, let me know.

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

It's been said before, but I'll say it again - don't stay in Red Pill mode longer than you absolutely need, and go in with a purpose. (say, to install SSH) You don't need red pill mode for root, that is a common misunderstanding. When not in red pill mode, you can't see these extra "updateable packages" that in fact will reliably brick your unit. Unless you yourself installed it in red pill mode, don't update it in red pill mode. Maemo 3.x simply doesn't support it, and I've never heard of it going well.

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

It should now be possible to install Open SSH without red pill mode or root access - the Open SSH packages have been updated in the last few days so that they now appear in the Application Manager.

There should be three packages - openssh-client, openssh-server and openssh, with the latter being a dummy package with dependencies on both openssh-client and openssh-server so that both client and server are installed with by selecting a single package (simply a convenience if you want client and server).

It should only be necessary to install openssh-server in order to login to your device using ssh.

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Ok thanks, won't take the pill again unless really needed.
I read somewhere that it's the same as "apt-get upgrade" but seems more than this.
I just reflashed. Before this I did:
cat /etc/apt/sources.list ( I am the only one to have problems to find repositories). Is there something like apt-get.org for maemo.
and then
dpkg --get-selections > packlist.txt
This is just so that I remember what was installed.

Becomeroot was installed as well as dropbear server and without red pill.
I've heard that only dropbear server allows X forwarding and it also looks lighter. So I use this one rather that official openssh-server.

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Yep - I just came across your other post and was going to reply with a reference to this post. It seems you found me first :D I tried to duplicate the problem with combinations of Red Pill mode and R&D mode and didn't manage to do it. It did not seem to be magic::sys all by itself that borks things, it seems to be some combination of things installed while in Red Pill mode. As an earlier poster has very sagely advised, I am now only going into Red Pill for things I absolutely have to and then returning to Blue Pill ASAP.

Cheers,
Kris

Re: N800 no longer loads GUI
 

Same for me, no more pills, I'm too old (or too yong) for pills anyway !
I am too new too this I only have my device since 1 week, so I still don't really understand what this hidden matrix feature does. I also really like the documentation "We still don't know exactly what this feature does" :)
Also another document (in .txt format that I can't find anymore) states that it's the same as doing apt-get upgrade. It think this is wrong. apt-get upgrade is the same as the gui part that says 'look for upgrades' or?
I did 10 upgrade today, even dist-upgrade (because some packages were kept), and it's still running.
As for the magic stuffs, I'll have to look what kind of magic is behind but until now, I don't touch it.

That brings my question: When do you really need to enable red pill mode?

I'll also rereread the R&D mode because I'm not sure I understood what it is. I do sudo gainroot, is this R&D mode?

There's a link debugging n800 that seems nice. I was lacking the log of the installed packages and the time of installation and status because I wanted to know exactly which packages didn't install properly before this noGUI problem. Without logs I couldn't see anything..

So may questions...
Maybe I'll hang around in the developpers mailing list or forum.