Had a "sort of" working install of 0704 on my FiireEngine ("sort of" in that the FE itself was working fairly well, but there were problems with the two FiireStations running off it). Received my copy of the 0710 install DVD in the post, so decided to upgrade to see if that solved the problems with the FiireStations. Tried using the gutsy-upgrade-scripts, as per the
wiki, and selecting to install from DVD. It copied all the packages from the DVD fine, but the script barfed at some point (I think on exit), apparently because I had installed a few non-core packages (e.g. emacs, which is the editor I am comfortable with). Still, it wasn't obvious what I should do, or that the failure to upgrade these packages was very serious, so I tried rebooting, as there were no further instructions. Now I have a dead FiireEngine.
If I select one of the recovery options from the grub menu (so I can see what is happening during boot-up), it gets as far as loading the forcedeth driver, and then freezes, eventually returning:
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/bf742ddb-[etc] does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
I have rebooted and changed the pointer to the root filesystem in one of the recovery options in grub, from root=uuid=bf742... to root=/dev/hda1, which is where I think the root filesystem is located by default on the FiireEngine. It still isn't happy (wanting to drop me to a console for repairs), but if I press Ctrl-D to carry on with the booting process regardless, it seems to mount the root filesystem and fires up the various processes. It seems to hang at the end, but that's simply because it hasn't fired up a GUI, nor switched me to one of the consoles. I can Alt-F1 to get an option to login. I had setup a password for root, so I can get in and edit stuff, so this has allowed me to find out what the UUID for the root device is and to edit grub accordingly. I also uninstalled the offending packages (emacs21, eieio, ede, semantic, jde).
Now I can reboot again, at the end of which it appears to successfully complete the installation process. But still I don't have the GUI - I am left at the console. I am not clear what I now need to do to get it to fire up the linuxmce GUI.
I've tried starting X as root, and then selecting Linux Media Center from the start menu. It's been ticking over for half an hour now. Don't know if it's just a question of patience, and whether it will start of its own accord as the linuxmce user next time I boot up. Any suggestions?
