Hmmm... I looked at my notes again and, of course, you were right.
The piece below should have read
Eora:/etc/X11# ls -ltr /etc/X11/X
elicited
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Jun 15 23:52 /etx/X11/X ->
../../usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86
It seems I am running 'X11R6' rather than 'X11' - whatever that means.
I thought I had recently upgraded via apt-get ..... I guess I'll have to
reboot into the Debian drive and try
ls -l ../../usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86
and see what happens. I'll get back to you later.
Adam.
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Palmer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 21 June, 2001 09:18 PM
To: Adam F. Bogacki
Cc: Slug@Slug. Org. Au
Subject: RE: [SLUG] Radical Solutions ...
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Adam F. Bogacki wrote:
> Upon advice, I ran, as root,
>
> cd /etc/X11
> ln -s ../../usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 X
Fine for an XFree 4 system. Assumption made.
> running (as root)
>
> ls -ltr /etc/X11/X
>
> elicited
>
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27Jun 15 23:52
Are you sure that's what it gave you? Seems to be missing a filename and
destination, to me.
> How do I "dereference the symlink and find the solution" ?
Basically it involves finding the real physical bytes that are read when the
system tries to open the file.
ls -l /etc/X11/X
find the name of the file pointed to, and ls -l that, until you get a real
live file. On this box, f' rinstance:
returned 0
mjp16
inductor:~$ ls -l /etc/X11/X
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Jan 10 11:05 /etc/X11/X ->
/usr/bin/X11/XFree86
returned 0
mjp16
inductor:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/X11/XFree86
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1496892 May 9 03:12 /usr/bin/X11/XFree86
This means, then, that when the system tries to open /etc/X11/X, it's really
going to get /usr/bin/X11/XFree86, a 1.4MB executable file.
Since symlinks can point to other symlinks multiple times, in some cases you
need to do that process several times. At the end, you should get a real
file, or a 'no such file or directory'. If you get that, you've got a
dangling symlink.
In this case, you should get a result very similar to the one I showed
above. If you don't, you have some interesting issues that need working
out. Let's see what transcends from this.
Basically, a positive result (sort of) is finding that we have a big hulking
file with execute permissions at the end of your symlinks. If this is the
case, we go looking at other problems. If it isn't, you're either not
running XFree 4 or you don't have the appropriate packages installed.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
#include <disclaimer.h>
Matthew Palmer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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