I'm trying to recompile the 2.6.8-13 kernel on my debian system, the reason being that it will be more optimized for my system, and that I'll get svga tty's and the new bootsplash feature. I patched my kernel source with bootsplash-3.1.4-sp3-2.6.8-10-debian.diff found at http://www.bootsplash.de/files/. The patching went without any problem at all.
Then I've tried to get a working configuration. I've tried several approaches, from compiling only what I need, to compiling with the options used in the stock debian kernel with the modifications needed to boot without an initrd. The later took 4 hours (!) to compile. I've been able to produce three kernels which boot properly, and everything works correctly until it tries to start xdm. Then it "blinks" (console screen, black screen, console screen, black screen etc) a few times. Then it justs stops. I get no login prompt. A minute later or so I get an error stating that ld is respawning to fast, and then it states that there are nothing more to do in this runlevel. I've seen this behaviour once before, when trying to start knoppix. Don't remember if it was on this computer or not. Anyway, I'm not able to switch to any other tty, except tty7, which displays an empty text screen, and I'm not able to switch back to tty1 from that. If I press CTRL-ALT-DEL the computer gives the normal
reboot messages and reboots correctly. That's how I know that tty7 displays a text screen.
Does anyone know why this might happen?
The computer is a Dell Latitude CPI D300XT, which has got a p2 300mhz, 6gb hd, 64mb ram, a neomagic nm2160 gfx card, a pcmcia nic with the realtek 8139 chip, a texas cardbus interface and an intel piix ide interface. I'm running debian sarge 3.1, x.org 6.8.1 and xfce 4.2 on it.
Regards, Alexander Toresson