On 09/04/2010 11:36 AM, Sven Joachim wrote:
On 2010-09-04 17:23 +0200, Gilbert Sullivan wrote:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)My crystal ball tells me that you've been hit by this change in the kernel: ,---- | linux-2.6 (2.6.32-21) unstable; urgency=high | | [ Ben Hutchings ] | [...] | * [x86] i915: Blacklist i830, i845, i855 for KMS | (Closes: #568207, #582105, #593432, #593507) `----
Hi, Sven. Ouch! That's so mean of them! :P
So downgrading the kernel would be my first attempt.
I'm going to ask a couple of questions because I'm not quite sure how to even research them.
The situation right now is that the system isn't connected to a network. I gather that, in order to downgrade the kernel, I've got to manage to connect from a command line interface. Haven't done that before in Linux. I use wicd. I'm supposing it's time to do man ifup and man ifdown. I think I can get through that.
However, I've never downgraded a package. From what I can see it looks as though 'dpkg -i package.deb' is used, providing I can find out how to get the appropriate package. I just looked in /var/cache/apt/archives and didn't see the previous image in there. That would be my fault. I used 'aptitude purge ~c'. Doh! I've been blithely doing 'aptitude autoclean' and 'aptitude purge ~c' after each set of upgrades all along. I read that that was a good practice on the Debian users forum. Eh. Maybe not so much. I've been blindly trusting that I would be able to work my way around any new issues that came up with package upgrades.
But having my display subsystem blacklisted doesn't seem to be something I can work around.
Do you have any specific suggestions as to how I could go about this? Is it time to retire this subnotebook (at least from use with Debian)? I really don't much like the idea of staying locked at an earlier linux-image version due to the possibility of related security issues. (I guess they're rare, but I'd still prefer to be as up-to-date as possible.)
Many thanks to you, Gilbert