Re: Problems with Xorg video

On Tuesday 08 May 2007 01:20, Florian Kulzer wrote:
[ It would be better not to top-post. You increase your chances of more
people joining in to help you if every individual message can be read
like a chronological story by someone who does not remember the
previous messages. ]

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 14:01:54 -0700, Mark Phillips wrote:
Florian,

I made some progress, but I am beginnning to believe that I have put
myself in a world of hurt.

You could also think of it as an interesting learning experience lying
ahead of you...

I got past not finding the i810 card by inserting the correct bus address
(see below). But now it complains that I am missing module i915. So, I
think I made a big mistake installing xorg! I should have gone to the
dentist for a root canal (without novacaine) instead of mucking with my
computer! ;-)

I think we can make this significantly less painful than having a root
canal without anesthetic.

My version of sarge probably does not support xorg, so I should be using
xfree86. How do I remove all the X stuff and start over again and install
xfree86. I am using kernel 2.6.8-2-386. THanks!

I think the problem may be that your version of the kernel lacks the
kernel part of the graphics drivers which is needed by Xorg. Essentially
you have three options now:

1) Switch to the "vesa" driver. There is a good chance that it will work
because it uses a generic way to address the video hardware without
any fancy tricks. The downside is that there will be no hardware
accelerated graphics rendering. This might be acceptable if you
mainly intend to do things like word processing, spreadsheets, etc.
If you need anything that uses 3D rendering then you can more or less
forget about vesa.

2) Upgrade your kernel to the latest version that is available as a
backport for Sarge. This may or may not work and it also involves a
udev upgrade. You can of course also try to compile a newer kernel
yourself. Overall it might be easier to just upgrade to Etch and be
done with it, though.

3) Remove Xorg and reinstall XFree86. You can probably trigger the
removal of Xorg by telling apt(itude) to purge package libx11-6. This
should take the rest of Xorg with it. With aptitude you could also
use something like

aptitude --purge-unused purge '~i(~dxorg|~dx11|~dxfree)'

This command asks for the purging of everything that has "xorg",
"x11" or "xfree" in its package description. (I am not 100% sure if
Sarge's version of aptitude already supports this type of pattern
matching.)

I will keep the most important parts of your xorg log in this message,
just in case. It does not give me any more ideas, but maybe somebody
else notices something. I am a bit surprised that it does not seem to
indicate complete failure to start X.

Here is the ouput you requested:
hammerhead:/home/mark# egrep '^\((EE|WW)\)' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[...]

(WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory)
(WW) I810(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(WW) I810(0): Extended BIOS function 0x5f11 not supported.
(WW) I810(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(WW) I810(0): config file hsync range 28-64kHz not within DDC hsync range
31-50kHz

[...]

(EE) I810(0): [dri] DRIScreenInit failed. Disabling DRI.
(WW) I810(0): Extended BIOS function 0x5f05 failed.
(EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable
(WW) I810(0): Successfully set original devices
(WW) I810(0): Setting the original video mode instead of restoring
(WW) I810(0): Extended BIOS function 0x5f05 failed.
(WW) I810(0): Successfully set original devices (2)
hammerhead:/home/mark#
awk '/Section "Device"/,/EndSection/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
hammerhead:/home/mark#

On Monday 07 May 2007 13:29, Florian Kulzer wrote:
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 12:29:41 -0700, Mark Phillips wrote:
I seem to have lost my video after moving from xfree86 to xorg.

The error reported in my xorg log (after many pages of no errors) -

(II) I810: Driver for Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810,
i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221
(i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 965G, 965G, 965Q, 946GZ
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 00:02:0
(WW) I810: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0:2:0)
found (EE) No devices detected.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

lspci reports:

[...]

0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp.
82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)

[...]

So, the graphics card is there.

Any suggestions? Could the graphics card be half-dead? It works in
text mode when I boot up, but X cannot start. If it works in text
mode must it also work in graphics mode? Should I get another
graphics card? Any suggestions on a good linux compatible card?

I am running debian sarge with kernel 2.6.8-2-386

Is this a backported version of Xorg? Sarge still had XFree86, right?

Also, please post the output of these two commands:

egrep '^\((EE|WW)\)' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

awk '/Section "Device"/,/EndSection/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

(The first one is just to make sure that you did not miss an error or a
warning message when you read the log yourself.)

--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |

Florian,

Thanks for all your help. I went ahead and upgraded the kernel and then to
etch, which seems to be working well now. The only problem is that the
process removed gnome and installed kde. No big deal, I just installed gnome,
and now I have both! And no data loss! I was surprised (but I shouldn't have
been) when, after installing gnome, I clicked on evolution and all my address
books, messages, etc. were right where they should be. The debian developers
are great!! :-)

The only hitch is that gdm is complaining about a bad line in its
configuration file. I had no idea which line was bad. However, the
differences between the old sarge gdm.conf and the new etch gdm.conf were so
great, that I just copied over the new default gdm.conf and now it works.

I upgraded to etch because I began to suspect that (1) I had to upgrade the
kernel to get the i915 module, and (2) I was missing the xorg fonts. Since I
was upgrading the kernel, why not go all the way and move to etch? So I did,
and it worked. The fonts were still missing, but I found the right package
and all is well with the world. Now, it is time to become productive again!

I will keep your notes on how to remove X - I googled for something like that,
but couldn't find something as succinct as your plan. Thanks!

Have a great day!

Mark


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