On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 22:23:53 +0000, john gennard wrote:
Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
Normally when X is started during boot by [xkg]dm and it fails then you
are just returned to the command prompt. If your box locks up completely
then there might be something really wrong with the graphics driver or
something is seriously wrong elsewhere. What is the last message that
you see before your system locks up?
I can't tell you that now. Earlier today I deleted Etch with Kde
and replaced it with Etch having Gnome just to see what would happen.
The result is the same, the box locks up and the logged error
messages are identical, but I cannot see the last booting message for
it's too quick and the screen immediately blanks out.
As a quick test you can boot into single user mode and remove the
runlevel 2 startup symlinks for the graphical log-in. This command will
list the relevant links:
ls -l /etc/rc2.d/S???dm
(There might be up to three links, for xdm, kdm, and gdm, respectively,
but if you installed the Gnome desktop task then you will probably only
have the gdm one.)
After you remove these symlinks X will no longer be started
automatically during boot. (Make a note of the links so that you can
restore them later on.) If the system comes up normally without X then
you can log in as your normal user and run "startx" manually. This
should make it clear if X is to blame for the lockup or not.
I bought this old laptop as it had XP installed and I had received a
large amount of research data created by using Excel - it's still in
the first partition. I'll have a look tomorrow to see what Graphics
driver Windows used and get back to you.
I don't think that the windows driver will tell us much. (The lspci
information that you posted earlier is enough to identify the card, but
we need someone who knows if this specific model has known issues with
the xorg driver.)