Newly installed Sarge: (1) halts at 8529A IRQ 7 (2) cannot start gdm: X server is missing.
Hello People,
I had Knoppix 3.8.1 intalled on an old AMD K7 Duron 700 with 128Mb RAM, all
OnBoard except the wireless eth card.
It worked OK.
Then I installed Sarge from scratch (keeping the Knoppix partitions but
re-installing the Sarge FS on it) using a netdist CD.
The CD part went very smoothly, but when it first booted from the HD I got:
(1) Spurious 8529A interrupt IRQ7; and it halted.
Using another PC I looked that up in google and saw that it was probably
related to the ACPI code on the 2.4 Kernel.
So I tried with the 2.6 Kernel but I had 2 problems:
(2.a) DHCP didn't work (and I tried several times) (but it did for Kernel
2.4)
(2.b) Leaving net unconfigured, it stops at some point saying that it
couldn't locate the Kernel image for 2.6. Either it is not on the netinst CD
or it was trying to get it from the internet (and of course it failed)
So I had to stick with the 2.4 Kernel.
I tried adding "linux acpi=off" on the CD prompt and installing all over
again but I still had the IRQ problem.
So I was about to install Knoppix back again when I read in its help window
to try: "knoppix acpi=off noapci pci=bios" for "broken BIOS"... I figured my
PC could have a broken BIOS so I tried those parameters with the debian
netinst CD.
It then passed the first HD boot and moved on with the installation.
Yet, after it finished downloading and configuring all the packages I got a
error saying that "Some packages couldn't be installed"... but it didn't say
which ones, so I just ignored it and finished the installation.
When I rebooted (for the first time with the system apparently fully
installed) I got back the IRQ problem, so I just rebooted again and again
until it passed (I eventually determined that the message always apperared
but 4 out of 5 times it also halted)
Since Knoppix wortked OK, and it used Kernel 2.6, I figure that I just need
to upgrade the Kernel to solve this hardware problems.
But then, after I finally booted my new debian system I ended up in the
console prompt.. why not a desktop? so I typed "startx" and got an error
message saying that the "X server was not found".
I typed "apt-get install kde" just to have apt-get install all the
dependencies (and thus the X server) and it said that XFree86-common was
required but wasn't going to be installed
So I typed "apt-get -f installed" and it download XFree86-common and spend
quite a lot of time updating packages.
I though it was it, but after I rebooted (about 5 times to get past the IRQ
halt); I still get the console prompt and the error that the X server is
missing.
Effectively, xinit is trying to execute "/usr/bin/X11R6/X" but I don't have
that X on my system.
Any clues?
TIA
Fernando Cacciola
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