New Debian install X problem

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:20:11AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> I had tried without an xorg.conf, which is why I thought adding one
> might help.  But the response is the same either way.  As for fluxbox
> vs xterm ...  I didn't try that because I'm almost entirely certain
> the problem is at a much lower level.  So instead I re-ran the
> install, but this time I installed "Graphical Desktop Environment"
> from the packages selection.  The install took much longer, but went
> fine.  When I rebooted, it came up to GRUB, and when I told it to go
> boot, it blacked out and became unresponsive - exactly as before.
> Forced a power off, booted again, this time chose recovery.  Guess
> what?  The geniuses at Debian have "recovery mode" go into graphical!
> So the computer goes black and unresponsive.

Recovery mode is normally single user.  It does NOT start X.  It never
has.  Perhaps the console font setting that is being done is breaking
the video output.  Or somehow the kernel is loading a framebuffer
driver which is messing things up (I have noticed fedora now does this
by default driving some people rather nuts).

> I have two OS partitions on this machine, so I guess I'm going to
> re-install Ubuntu on one of them to see what happens.  The old Ubuntu
> install that worked so well was first installed in 2005 and
> continuously upgraded (it still exists on another HD, and is a last
> ditch solution) so I'm not sure a fresh Ubuntu install will work in
> this case.  I would certainly welcome any further thoughts on how to
> troubleshoot this, or what might be causing it.  Thanks.

So which video chip does this machine use?

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists