Re: Advice for troubleshooting X (total screen loss) -- Newb Alert

Emailed too soon -- I was actually able to run the nvidia installer script
without a problem
this time around (mysteriously!) so I am now all set up and can resume
setting up the
new Debian box.

Thanks again to everyone for your advice and patience!

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Jeff Soules <soules@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You can also see that I've disabled glx output and restricted screen
resolution to 1024x768 or lower (non-widescreen resolutions) in the
hope that this might help, but no luck so far.


I should've been clearer -- I made those changes through dpkg-reconfigure.
(I've grown
quite comfortable with the menu interface to Xorg.conf in the last 24
hours!)

And, BTW, you're using etch, right?

Correct.

lspci shows one VGA-compatible device, the line is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0402
(rev a1)

I should've looked harder at the Xorg.0.log I got when I ran with the VGA
drivers; it told
me directly that the VGA driver does not support 24-bit color depth, so it
unloaded
itself. I set this back down to 8-bit color, and just like that I can load
up a minimal
gnome desktop.

Sadly it has decided the correct resolution is 320x200, which is not yet
very useful --
I can't even see to reposition any of the control panels -- when I was
hoping once I
got a minimal setup I could use that as a base to finish configuring the
nVidia-supplied
drivers. But at least this is wonderful progress! Thank you!


On that note --

You could also try if you can install the newest nvidia driver on Etch
with nvidia's own installer script:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_173.14.09.html

It might help if you get a newer kernel from www.backports.org first.
Also make sure that you purge (not just remove) the Debian nvidia
packages before you try this.


I had originally tried to run nvidia's installer, but it complained that it
would have to
recompile the kernel with its own hooks to load the nvidia driver. So I
downloaded
and gunzipped the kernel source package, but nVidia's script couldn't find
version.h
under the directory where source was installed, so I eventually gave up and
tried
what was supposed to be "the debian way".
(Sorry, that's rather inexact -- I did this several days ago and it was
before
I started taking careful notes of exactly every command I was running.)

I'll mess around with this a bit more and then report back.

Best,
Jeff

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