[ale] a no way out situation

[Jim Philips]

To date, no amount of fiddling has gotten me a network connection or
an X session. What I have tried:

1. dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg  After this, I get a warning that my
keyboard and mouse are not working. I get a dialogue box that requires
"OK" to get past. With no keyboard and no mouse, I can't get past it.

2. I tried a wired connection and "ifup eth0". This just tells me that
eth0 is not recognized, even thought it shows up if I run "ifconfig
-a".

3. Selecting "Networking" from the "Recovery" screen. This gets me a
blinking cursor that never stops.

4. Using a boot disk. My BIOS gives me a chance to select hard drive
or CD/DVD drive to boot from. Selecting CD/DVD drive brings me right
back to a boot from the hard drive. I think this broke the last time
BIOS updated.

So, I'm really screwed when it comes to starting Linux. I can't even
do a reinstall. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.


On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Jim Philips <briarpatch.jim at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Ubuntu 12.10, I tried upgrading the ATI driver to fglrx-updates.
> After this, X wouldn't start. If I start up in recovery mode, there is
> a Networking option. Selecting this starts fsck, which never finishes.
> If I drop to the root prompt, I don't see any way to start wireless
> networking. So, as it stands, I see no way to update any packages. Any
> ideas?