[ale] gdm crashes my laptop

[John Heim]

From: "Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us>
To: ale at ale.org
?>> This did not work. But I deleted /ext/X11/xorg.conf and that worked. I 
now
>> have a GUI.  Next, install the screen reader for gnome, orca.
>>
>
>Interesting.
>'sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg' will help you setup a working 
>X.org>configuration file with better settings than
>the defaults without it.
>
>IIRC, without the xorg.conf file, you get the VESA driver and next to
>nothing in the way of extra input devices and the like (and certainly no
>scroll-wheel, either, I don't think).

Yeah, I assumed it would recreate the xorg.conf. But it didn't.

I think earlier I did try "dpkg-reconfigure  xserver-xorg" but it was asking 
me questions I didn't know the answer to. Like screen resolution and refresh 
rate.  I can't read the manual to get those.  Maybe they're in the old 
xorg.conf (which I actually renamed and did not delete). But I have 
absolutely no idea of what these values should be because I have never dealt 
with the GUI before. I am typing this message on a Windows machine and I 
have no idea what the screen resolution is set to. It could be 20 x 3295.2 
for all I know.

Normally, I'd handle this problem by running ubuntu and saving the xorg.conf 
file back to the hd. But I can't get the live ubuntu CD to talk on this 
laptop.  If you start speech on a machine with 256 Mb of RAM, ubuntu freezes 
up.

Oh, I know... I'll start ubuntu, run gnome-terminal, and scp the xorg.conf 
file to another machine. Then reboot and copy it back to the hd. I think I 
can start gnome-terminal and type in an scp command w/o speech. I'll know if 
I got it right by checking if the file exists on the other machine.

Let you know if it works tomorrow.