Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published October 19th, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran

Gentoo: gdm/XOrg Issue after kernel upgrade

I just updated a Gentoo box from kernel-2.6.10r1 to 2.6.13. This necessitated a change from devfs to udev. Not a major problem of itself, but it broke my X server. The issue I saw was a blank screen after gdm/xdm started. Te following messages could be seen in the syslog…

gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
deal_with_x_crashes: Running the XKeepsCrashing script

Not terribly helpful, but its a start. The /var/log/gdm/\:0.log was a little more helpful:

(EE) xf86OpenSerial: Cannot open device /dev/mouse
        No such file or directory.
(EE) Mouse1: cannot open input device
(EE) PreInit failed for input device "Mouse1"
No core pointer

Fatal server error:
failed to initialize core devices

After a bit of digging, it appears that /dev/mouse no longer exists. I did the following to fix it:

cd /dev
ln input/mice mouse

Now gdm and XOrg start without any problems.

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