a day or three ago I had dist-upgraded to Trixie, but hadn't rebooted. I did, last night, just before bed. up early this morning, I attempted startx, all I got was a full-screen X window with a Bash prompt at the top, in tiny print, and unresponsive to keyboard or mouse. However, ctrl-alt-backspace did work to get back into terminal mode. an error on the screen showed "xf86EnableIO: failed to enable I/O ports 0000-03ff (Operation not permitted)", so I googled it. a number of people had the same problem after upgrades, starting about 2 years ago, and it had something to do with X configuration; but I installed this computer from a bookworm live CD image just a few weeks ago.
turns out while upgrading, fluxbox got removed. huh. reinstalled, and I'm good to go.
last updated 2025-03-28 07:43:34. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com