After having dain bramaged myself for years with Linux usage. I had gotten spoiled into believing an OS should make it simple to do the following:
1. Shutdown computer
2. Swap around hardware components
3. Restart
4. Life is good
However any techie should tell you this is a pipe dream on Windows. Mac users probably have no clue since they never change hardware components and just buy new Macs to solve their problems. Which leaves the lucky OSS *nix variants to try stunts like this.
Being the stubborn person I am, I attempted this with OpenSolaris by swapping out my motherboard. I wanted to do this in order to take advantage of the E7400 Core 2 Duo that I bought awhile back. Things almost worked however on reboot I was given the dreaded console login screen with a useless keyboard. The following as far as I know don´t work…
1. CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE
2. CTRL-ALT-Fn
3. CTRL-ALT-DEL
Your best bet is to ssh somehow and try to look for clues. Here is what I did…
1. Swap motherboard and stare at dark screen
2. Find out how to boot into single user mode and make sure the kernel isn’t PO-ed or something and find my IP address
3. Move away the X11 configuration that I configured (dual-display) and try rebooting
4. Reboot and find out it isn’t working
5. ssh in and realize it still isn’t working. Move the old dual display X11 config back to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
6. Try restarting gdm with svcadm restart gdm and watch it fail
7. Scritch head some more
8. Try starting X from the SSH session and whoah it works
9. Restart gdm (svcadm restart gdm) and now I get a login screen
10. Realize that I disconnected the left monitor (VGA) to help debug and want it back
11. Logout and log back in. I now have dual screens and a working Solaris install again!
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