[vox-tech] debian woody to sarge upgrade = dead xserver

[R. Douglas Barbieri]

Ashleigh,

I had a similar problem with my laptop. I have an "Nvidia GeForce4 440 
Go 64M" with an AMD64 chip (technically, it's an HP Pavilion zv5000 
laptop). I was running Debian Sarge with a 2.4.26 kernel for a good deal 
of time, with X running like a champ. A little while ago I did an 
"apt-get upgrade", and suddenly X stopped working.

Of course, I was not using the nv driver--rather I am currently using 
the Nvidia drivers in Debian (in the XF86Config-4 file, you put "nvidia" 
instead of "nv"). I could not for the life of me figure out why I 
couldn't get X to run. On a whim, I decided to turn off devfs support 
and voila, X started working again...

So, my questions to you are, 1) are you using the nvidia drivers and 2) 
if so, are you running with devfs turned on? If so, you might want to 
turn off devfs just to see if you still have the same problems.

PS: I even had devfs mounting in a different directory than /dev 
(/devfs, kinda like what Mandrake does). This still caused the nvidia 
driver to be unhappy. AND the /dev/nvidia* entries were properly 
created. Under 2.4.26, the latest Nvidia drivers just don't like devfs 
for some reason.

Doug Barbieri


Ashleigh Smythe wrote:

> Kevin Murakoshi said
> 
>> Yeah, just the error message is not much help, you really want to look
>> at the lines above it, where it talks about what screens it is using.
>> There should be a section above where it talks about what particular
>> thing errored.
>>
>> If you just moved to the 2.6 Kernel then you will need to load some
>> mouse modules at boot (I had this problem with X when i switched to
>> 2.6) you need "mousedev'" and "psmouse".
>>
>> If you could it would be nice to see the whole XF86Config-4 file and
>> the output from /var/log/XFree86.0.log.
>>
> 
> 
> Sorry I forgot to post what my current kernel is - I'm running 
> 2.4.18-686.  I'll get my zip drive and be able to post my error log and 
> XFConfig-4 file in a couple hours.
> 
> Thanks for the input so far.
> 
> Ashleigh
> 
> ***************************
> Ashleigh B. Smythe
> Graduate Research Assistant
> Department of Nematology
> UC Davis
> One Shield's Ave.
> Davis, CA 95616
> (530)754-4321
> absmythe at ucdavis.edu
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-- 
R. Douglas Barbieri
doug at dooglio.net
http://www.dooglio.net
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