> 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!)Correct.
And, BTW, you're using etch, right?
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 --I had originally tried to run nvidia's installer, but it complained that it would have toYou 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.
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