Re: gmd fails

[JG <j2003gi@yahoo.es>]

Hi,


Aswin Venkat <venkat@bevo.che.wisc.edu> writes:

> Hi all-
> 
> This is my first attempt at installing debian (woody 3.0r1)
> and i have been running
> into a few problems. I have a Sony VAIO laptop. I managed
> to have the base system installed and also included
> the gmd package. However when the system boots, the screen flickers
> for a while before i get the the message that gmd failed. When i
> checked the  status report, i found the following errors. 
> 
> ----
> Chipset generic found
> VGA(0) Driver can't support depth 24
> Screens found but none have a usable configuration
> 
> Fatal server error
> No screens found
> ----
> I had selected VGA as the video driver(am not 100% sure thats the right
> choice) and 24in depth color.
> 

The error is pretty obvious. The VGA driver does not support 24 dpi
color. You can reconfigure X and tell it a lower number (just to get it
working). The VGA driver should work with any card, and give you an X
environment. To reconfigure X:

$ dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

To get a better driver you can install an specific driver for your
chip. According to the xserver-xfree86 package description

"If the mdetect and read-edid packages are present, the debconf scripts in
this package will use them to attempt automatic configuration of your mouse
and monitor."

So you can install those

$ apt-get install mdetect read-edid

and reconfigure the X server as above.

Also, assuming that the graphics card is in the PCI bus (which usually
is, in new systems), you can obtain information about it with lspci
(install the pciutils package), mine looks like

$ lspci
[... deleted ...]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility
P/M AGP 2x (rev 64) 
[... deleted ...]

So mine is an ATI Rage Mobility. Yours will be different. "lspci -v "
gives you more information. This should help you to choose and
appropiate driver.

If you find further problems, you can find further help reading the
Debian specific documentation in

/usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/README.Debian.gz

or the Frequently Asked Questions in

/usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/FAQ.gz

Hope this helps,

Jaume


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