Re: Advice for troubleshooting X (total screen loss) -- Newb Alert

["Jeff Soules" <soules@gmail.com>]

> > You can also see that I've disabled glx output and restricted screen
> > resolution to 1024x768 or lower (non-widescreen resolutions) in the
> > hope that this might help, but no luck so far.

I should've been clearer -- I made those changes through dpkg-reconfigure.  (I've grown
quite comfortable with the menu interface to Xorg.conf in the last 24 hours!)

And, BTW, you're using etch, right?

Correct.

lspci shows one VGA-compatible device, the line is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0402 (rev a1)

I should've looked harder at the Xorg.0.log I got when I ran with the VGA drivers; it told
me directly that the VGA driver does not support 24-bit color depth, so it unloaded
itself.  I set this back down to 8-bit color, and just like that I can load up a minimal
gnome desktop.

Sadly it has decided the correct resolution is 320x200, which is not yet very useful --
I can't even see to reposition any of the control panels -- when I was hoping once I
got a minimal setup I could use that as a base to finish configuring the nVidia-supplied
drivers.  But at least this is wonderful progress!  Thank you!

On that note --

> You could also try if you can install the newest nvidia driver on Etch
> with nvidia's own installer script:
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_173.14.09.html
>
> It might help if you get a newer kernel from www.backports.org first.
> Also make sure that you purge (not just remove) the Debian nvidia
> packages before you try this.



I had originally tried to run nvidia's installer, but it complained that it would have to
recompile the kernel with its own hooks to load the nvidia driver.  So I downloaded
and gunzipped the kernel source package, but nVidia's script couldn't find version.h
under the directory where source was installed, so I eventually gave up and tried
what was supposed to be "the debian way".
(Sorry, that's rather inexact -- I did this several days ago and it was before
I started taking careful notes of exactly every command I was running.)

I'll mess around with this a bit more and then report back.

Best,
Jeff