It’s 2:00AM on a weeknight, I have to be up at 7 for work: I’m tired and tomorrow is going to suck.
There is some light on the situation, however. After many hours of grief, my laptop is fixed. It took a lot of chatting in IRC, on AIM, emails, forums, and a rather large number of Google searches: but my computer is back the way it should be.
So what was wrong? Well, I dont entirely know. Somewhere during my forced removal of VMWare I messed up some system files. Luckily, there are people in this world that are smarter than me, and a whole lot more patient than me. So lets get into how this was rectified.
First, since my computer wasn’t getting past the login screen (all I was getting was an orange screen and a grey box in the upper left corner), I assumed it was an issue with the X Server. I was at least somewhat right.
VMware had entered some files and configurations for its own purposes into my xorg configuration, and by removing them forcefully, I messed that up. I dont have a backup of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (though, if my past has taught me anything, it’s to backup these little pesky things). So, to work around that, I was told that I could boot a LiveCD of Ubuntu, then just cp the xorg.conf from that directly into place of my old one
$ mkdir ~/OS
$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 ~/OS
$ sudo mv ~/OS/etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/OS/etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
$ sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/OS/etc/X11/xorg.conf
$ sudo shutdown -r now
So, I tried that, still nothing. At this point I was sort of gringing at the thought of possibly having to reinstall OS (sometimes it’s just easier than trying to unbreak things). After some talking in IRC, the idea of running the uninstall script for VMWare might be a good idea (if I had known there was one, I would have ran it in the first place). Apparently, during the installation VMware placed a file called ‘vmware-uninstall.pl’ in the /usr/bin directory. So in essence, all I should have had to do was run:
$ sudo vmware-uninstall.pl
But, now, that was not an option. I had deleted every file with even the slightest mention of VMware in it, including this uninstall script.
Later it was determined that I might could just reinstall VMWare temporarilly and see if the computer will try and boot.
The idea, of going through the hassle of redownloading, re-unpacking, and reinstalling this software made my skin crawl… but, some things just need to be done. I went and wget’ed a fresh, shiny new copy of VMWare Server Edition 1.0.6 from the VMWare website. Hooray.
I do have one positive thing to say to the folks at VMWare, your files are incredibly fast downloading. I averaged 730Kb/s on both of my downloads for VMWare Server. Thats just, unheard of in comparison to what I am used to.
So, after my download completed (maybe a minute and a half for 200Mb of stuff), I unpacked it, and began my reinstall.
5 or so minutes later, the reinstall was complete and I am off on my way to reboot and try this again.
To my astonishment, it does the same thing it has been doing for the past several hours: the aforementioned orange screen and grey box. I sit in my spinny office chair and sulk. Nothing seems to be working. I need this machine running as soon as possible and it just is not wanting to cooperate.
I did have another machine that was working, my recently worked on desktop. So, I go to check my email, read some RSS stuff, check out Xkcd. I try to completely put this laptop issue out of my head. I start thinking about what got me there in the first place. Originally, I was going to unstall a virtual machine for a rooting challenge for enigmagroup.org to try and hack. In it, was going to be a vulnerable version of PHP, and running on that was going to be a CMS with a gaping security hole, screaming out “EXPLOIT ME PLEASE!”.
Nine hours after that initial idea, I was sitting alone in a dark room full of computer equipment trying to salvage a fubar’d laptop.
Thinking “screw it”, I left the room and got some water. Being devoid of liquid for that long can give you a headache, and I could feel one coming one: ‘nip it in the bud’.
When I come back into the room, I notice a rather interesting thing. I see my wallpaper up on the laptop. And plastered all over the wallpaper are folders and files. My folders and files. And on the top and bottom of the wallpaper are the Gnome panels.
My laptop was fixed.
How? I still don’t know. Maybe it just needed a second to simmer in its juices. Maybe it was sick of looking at me and fixed itself in my absense. The votes are open on exactly what happened, but I do know that it feels like it did before, and that I typed this up on my laptop.
Tonight wasn’t so bad after all.