On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 12:16:19PM -0500, dan moylan wrote:
>   - audio ceased to work;=20
[...]
>   - the scanner function on the hp4580 printer/fax/scanner
>     ceased to work -- xsane doesn't find any scanner; the

At first guess, both of these sound like the relevant drivers are
missing from your kernel (i.e. the modules are missing). =20

>   - the login gui no longer appears, so i login via a text
>     screen, and use startx -- no biggie, but what ever
>     became of inittab?

The SysV init most distros were using has now been replaced in some
recent distros (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) by upstart, an "event-based
init daemon" which keeps its config info in /etc/event.d instead of
inittab.  I've been meaning to look into why it changed...

> these things seem so unrelated ... and i can think of no
> action i took that might have triggered them, but who knows?

If you do regular updates, and if there was a kernel update that you
got recently, it may have killed the drivers you were using.  I've had
that happen to me before, esp. with audio.  Of course, there may be
other explanations.   If you still have old kernels available to boot
=66rom, try one of those and see if things start working again...=20

--=20
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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