Stephen Liu <satimis@icare.com.hk> writes:
I just finished another clean installation of Debian 3.0 with
net-installer (Sarge) and encountered starting xserver problem
Vedio card - WinFast GeForce2 MX
RAM - 32MB
driver chosen - nv
...
(--) Chipset GeForce2 MX/MX 400 found
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "800x600" (insufficient memory for
mode)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (insufficient memory for
mode)
(WW) NV(0): Mode pool is empty
(EE) NV(0): No valid modes found
What I take from this: you're using the right driver for your card
("GeForce2 MX" does sound like an NVidia card, and 'nv' would be the
right driver), and the X server finds your card, but doesn't realize
there's memory available. (1024x768x32bpp would require exactly 3 MB
of memory, which you should easily be able to handle.) If you look in
/var/log/XFree86.0.log, does it list the amount of memory that's being
detected? If it's detecting wrong, you might need to add 'VideoRam
32768' in the "Device" section of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4; you also
might be able to specify video memory manually in 'dpkg-reconfigure
xserver-xfree86'. (And if it asked you "how much memory" and you
answered "32", that would cause this, though that's just speculation.)