Frank J Bivings wrote:
I hope this is the correct place to state my problem.
Yes, it is.
I am having problems with the graphics card. I installed Debian Linux 3.0 and, during the install I included XFree86. Upon booting it I get an error stating that: "I cannot start the Xserver (your graphical interface), it is likely that it is not setup correctly. Would you like to view the Xserver output to diagnose the problem?". If I reply YES I get a blank window with only the option to hit OK. If I reply NO to get a new start to enter username & password. It then says "username@sysname:~$" , and then hangs because I don't know where to go from there. My only choice is Ctl+Alt+del., and get back in Windows XP. During the install I had to hunt down Xfree86, on the CD, but it, supposedly, installed with no apparent problems.
Installing Debian, especially the "current" version (which is pretty old, and is about to be replaced with a version with a better installer) is not particularly easy to get set up properly. But once set up, it sure is easy to maintain.
At the login screen with "username@systemname:~$" you can do all sorts of things (like "lynx" for text-mode web browsing, or "apt-get install mutt" to install a text-based mail client, or "mutt" to run that mail client, or "nano" to edit text files, or blah blah blah).
But you're interested in getting X working. First, what video card do you have? Run "lspci" and look for a line like: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 RL/VR AGPIf the line mentions "unknown device", you'll probably want to upgrade your kernel, and perhaps other parts of your system (as mentioned above, the current version of Debian is fairly old, and may not recognize newer pieces of hardware).
Assuming your video card is detected properly, you can reconfigure XFree86 with "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and select the correct driver for that video card. You may have to google or guess for a match; for example, would my card above need the "ati" or the "r128" driver? Hmmm.
"startx" will again try to start up the graphical system. You can find a log file of the startup in "/var/log/XFree86.0.log". Your problem might be something other than the video driver, like the mouse not being found, or no clients installed.
Just to make sure you have the basic X packages, you might want to "apt-get install x-window-system".
-- Kent