"Fatal server error" when starting X on FreeRunner

[Denver Gingerich]

2008/8/26 Luca Capello <luca at pca.it>:
> Hi!
>
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:14:30 +0200, Esben Stien wrote:
>> "Denver Gingerich" <denver at ossguy.com> writes:
>>> Fatal server error:
>>
>> It might be as easy as reinstalling xorg. For the last 6 years, I've
>> been running my own distro, so I'm pretty new to debian on my
>> freerunner, but I've noticed twice that the package system has
>> downloaded a corrupt deb and installed it, resulting in applications
>> just crashing.
>
> If this is a corruption problem, you're right, nothing more than
> reinstalling X.org.  Denver, can you try the following, please?
>
>  root at debian-gta02:~# apt-get --reinstall install \
>   xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-tslib

That fixed the issue (I get an X screen with an X pointer), although
I'm now running into other problems (the X screen dies after a few
seconds but it's not X's fault; no problems in Xorg.0.log).  They are
probably symptoms of the same root problem: a corrupted installation.
I had some issues getting through the installation because of clocking
issues on the SD card, as reported by others [1].  I thought I got
them corrected by turning down the clock speed according to Openmoko
ticket #1743 [2], but apparently there are still problems.

The real solution here is to find an SD card that doesn't require
tuning the SD controller clock.  If anyone has some known-good cards
for the FreeRunner, I'd be happy to hear what they are.  The one I'm
using a 2GB Transcend microSD card which looks identical to the
bundled 512MB card (except for the size, of course).  I have not had
any issues with the 512MB card.  I will try the Debian install again
using the 512MB card, but it would be nice to know where I can buy
another microSD card that works.  Ideally I'd like to have a few
different microSD cards, one for each OS I'm testing.

Denver


1. http://www.mail-archive.com/community@lists.openmoko.org/msg26195.html
2. http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1743