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Topic: Need help I goofed up my machine, aterm and console prompt died

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u2musicmike Offline

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Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: April 14 2006,14:45

I don't know exactly what I did. I was trying out several new things: I mounted tcltutor.uci for the first time. I tried to format some bad floppys. I was looking at the contents of a zip file.

Afterwards I noticed that aterm will not work. It just flashes on the screen real quick and disappears. I tried ctrl-alt-F1 and no prompt and then I tried ctrl-alt-backspace and only logon comes up. The only way I get a prompt is if I run tclsh.

My machine is an old pentium 64meg and it is a hd install.

Thanks,
Mike

mikshaw

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Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 14 2006,17:40

I'm not sure why you should be logged out when you ctrl+alt+backspace...as far as I know it should take you to a bash prompt. Maybe bash itself is having trouble? Generally I use a bash shell to troubleshoot application troubles, but I've never seen a situation where i couldn't get a bash shell.

Did you change any environment variables, such as SHELL?

Some things you could try...

Open the run dialog and type aterm or xterm or rxvt. They are all actually aterm, but if one works when another does not, it may narrow down the problem (e.g. perhaps there is a messed up .Xdefaults file).

See if you can start some other console applications from the menu, such as midnight commander or top. If they succeed, then aterm is working, and you can look elsewhere for the trouble.

Open the run dialog and type in "aterm &>aterm.log". After aterm flashes you can then open up aterm.log and see if there are any error messages listed.

Edit .xinitrc to redirect your window manager's output to a file. In the "case" statement where it starts your chosen window manager, add "&>wm.log" after the window manager command. If there is already a "&>/dev/null" there, replace /dev/null with the log filename.

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u2musicmike Offline

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Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: April 15 2006,19:53

I didn't have much luck trying to make the log files. For aterm it made an empty log file in emelfm so I tried it in tclsh and it gave aterm bad option. The window manager entry didn't produce anything. Here is what I had after the case statement:
fluxter &>wm.log &

Do you think tcl highjack my shell? I had installed the tcl dsl packages but could get them to do anything so I was trying the tutor. How do I remove uci and tcl packages?

Thanks,
Mike

mikshaw

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Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 15 2006,23:12

fluxter &>wm.log & wouldn't work, since fluxter is not the window manager. If you do fluxbox &>wm.log you should get a log with all stdout/stderr messages that are not already handled by other applications or redirected to /dev/null.

Tcl won't hijack your shell, as far as i can see. Even if it did somehow manage that, it would not cause aterm to crash. Have you successfully opened tclsh from the icon right-click? It's not the tkcon shell that you get from the menu or by simply clicking on the icon, but the one you get from a right-click on the icon and selecting "Standard Tcl Console". If this works, then the problem is definitely not aterm itself.

The uci packages are mounted rather than installed....you can use the uci tool to umount them. The Tcl libraries are installed into /opt/tcl_libs. You can delete that whole directory without any negative effects. This may be a biased opinion, but i really doubt installing Tcl or related packages has anything to do with your trouble. It is most likely some change you made that perhaps you thought was unrelated. It would help a lot if you could remember more specifically what you did and what changes you may have made...any changes to config files? Did you run any commands from tclsh, or from a bash shell before installing Tcl?

Did you try the other suggestions?
You say you tried to start aterm from tclsh, and you got "bad option"? That sounds like you tried to start it with a commandline parameter that aterm can't understand, which would cause aterm to automatically shut down. This is the most logical cause that i can think of at the moment. But the big question is "How did this bad parameter get thrown into the mix?". Can you please try to start aterm from tclsh again, and this time take note of any specifics besides just "bad option"? It should have been followed by the actual bad parameter that was passed to aterm, and then we'd have a better idea of what to look for. My initial guess is that there is something wrong with .Xdefaults, or you made an alias to aterm with a bad parameter in it.

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u2musicmike Offline

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Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: April 17 2006,00:17

Thanks for the help I really don't know what I'm doing. I got &>wm.log in the right place and this was the only message: sh: line 1: /tmp/pipe.lua: Permission denied What do these permissions need to be?

Tcl won't hijack your shell, as far as i can see.

Tcltutor wouldn't start so I executed wish from my /bin directory which didn't appear to do anything. I finally got around doing a man wish and it is a TCL shell where if you run it with no perimeters it waits for a TCL command. When I hit crtl-alt-F1 it has no prompt and shows anything that I type and I hit crtl-c and it displays xinit: unexpected signal 2 then asks for login. Do you think it killed Bash because wish is still waiting? How do I turn off wish if it is on?

I think aterm works but won't open. tclsh said "&>aterm.log" was a bad option when I run aterm &>aterm.log so I tried it with the options in the icon aterm -T "Bash" -e /bin/bash &>aterm.log and got an empty log file. It didn't make icons for tclsh or wish I find them under the MyDSL menu tree when I right click. I did get tcltudor.uci unmounted and at least I do get a proper shutdown now.

Mike

7 replies since April 14 2006,14:45

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