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

[Ashleigh Smythe]

Doug Barbieri wrote:

>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
>
>


Thanks for the ideas Doug.  I have been just using the nv driver, not 
the nvidia.  I don't seem to have that one (maybe you meant I was to 
get it and install it as a debian package?)  - I get a slightly 
different error when I try to startx with the "nvidia" driver - now 
one of the "EE" errors is "Failed to load module "nvidia" (module 
does not exist).

As for turning off devfs support I'm sorry to say that I don't know 
how to do that - I'll google around about it next.

I finally got the error log and XF86Config-4 so I'll post those next.

Thanks,

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