startx fails/freezes machine (hamm)

[Stuart Marshall <marshall@sioux.llnl.gov>]

Hi,

On a fresh Debian 2.0 installation I am having severe
problems running X.  It seems like some hardware incompatibility
and I've exhausted my own knowledge of what to try. I have to
suspect the video and scsi cards but they work together just
fine in text mode.

Now for the details:

Symptoms:  When I "startx" the monitor clicks, and appears to go into
           text mode with a blank screen.  No further keyboard input
           is recognized except Crtl-Alt-Del which cleanly reboots
           the machine.  None of {Crtl-Alt-Backspace, Crtl-Alt-F2, etc..}
           work to get back out of X.  Output from startx and
	   "strace -f startx" show nothing helpful.

Software:  A fresh Debian 2.0 install with XF86_S3
           as the xserver (xserver-s3_3.3.2.2-4.deb).

Hardware:  Number Nine GXE64 2Mb video card (~4 years old)
           Symbios 53c875 based scsi card (Diamond Fireport 40) (new)
	   5 scsi devices of various ages (cdrom and disks)
	   Abit BX6 motherboard w 64MB PC100 memory (new) 
	   Intel PII 233 MHz cpu (given to me -- unknown history)
	   Sony 200sx monitor (~2 years old)
	   modem, soundcard, ethernet card (old)
	   PS/2 style mouse, keyboard

I tried with the soundcard and ethernet card removed.  Same problem.

During the installation, the xbase-configure program worked fine
up to the point where it tries to run XF86_S3.  The XF86_VGA16
server works fine during  the xbase-configure program.  Naturally
rebooting at that stage of the installation caused a few problems.

I had previously been running Debian 1.3 on an Intel 486 66MHz machine
that used the same video, monitor, modem, soundcard, nic.  I used to
use an ncr53c810 scsi card also but had to buy the Diamond Fireport 40
since the new motherboard bios did not recognize the old scsi card.

I tries various bios settings.  I made sure there are no memory
holes or memory shadowing settings enabled.  I also tried having
the bios assign an irq to the video card -- it made no difference.

So, can anyone recommend a solution or course of action?  I  will try
another video card if I can borrow one but I am really suprised that
my old faithful S3 based card is not working with this new setup.
Perhaps I should have bought a buslogic scsi card instead?

thanks in advance,

Stuart


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