[2007.2 fr] boot prolems

[Harry L. Lee]

first off, I am a person with disabilities: my left arm does not function.
pre-stroke, I had extensive experience as a developer/engineer in both
corporate and FOSS environments. a few falls over he past year convinced me
i needed to have a cellphone for a lifeline.i already carry a pda in my
shirt pocket, so i need a phone that replaces that functionality, and in
2008, i moved my personal computing environment to strictly FOSS. i have
lusted for a freerunner from the first i heard of them. at christmas, i was
given enough money to allow me to obtain one. (I live on a fixed and limited
income, $400 was a major investment for me.) it came tuesday. (I had
pre-read the "getting started" page.) i charged it for a few hours then
slogged through getting it hooked up via usb, then slogged through doing the
updates, which did not go well all (but that's another issue for another
time.)

suffice it to say fr is now in a state where it has no xserver, and
endlessly scrolls error messages on the display resulting from the mishmash
created by the botched update process. i can access a command shell on the
fr via ssh. i can wget so dns is working, as is acccess to the Net as a
whole.

however I cannot successfully press and hold aux then press power to get to
the boot menu.

i'm pretty creative about solving you only have one hand problems, but i
haven't been able to beat this one. before you try to tell me "just do
this", pleas try your method with your left (more accurately, non-dominant)
hand in its pocket (you'd be amazed how many things you use both for without
realizing.

it seems there should be a relatively simple software based solution to this
problem. the boot menu is just a program, somewhere (I assume in what a
dinosaur like me would think of as) the computer's memory space. it would
seem if you knew where it was, you could use a debugger to jump to that
location and begin execution. it would seem a shell script could accomplish
that, or even a small binary executable. if some om zen master could either
point out why that wouldn't work, or whip up the appropiate tool, i''d be
eternally grateful.

-- 
harry at jonesnose.com
Harry L Lee (via gmail)
chief cook and bottle washer
http://jonesnose.com
mailto:harry at jonesnose.com
207-384-8030 (email preferred)
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