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 ...

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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..