Hello all, I'm a random young Linux user with a big trouble...

I want to switch to Debian from Linux Mint. I've tried the official Debian live CD using "live" command, but it resulted just a black screen after the boot was finished. Even the *lock keys won't flash their lights. Apparently "livefailsafe" only works on me.

(I've had this problem also with Ubuntu 7.10, and it also worked only in the safe graphics mode. Similar problems have occured also on my cheap 2004's Dell laptop, on which no distro (even DSL) won't work.)

For some reason, the "livefailsafe" starts with my right resolution, 1280x800, as it should be in 800x600 or something. Here we can get to my first question: What is different with "live" and "livefailsafe"?

So I would like to use something like that "livefailsafe" in the "actual" installed system, but I don't know how. So this is my second question: How to make an actual installation boot in the fail-safe mode?

While I was trying Ubuntu 7.10 with these same results, someone on #ubuntu-fi suggested "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" to fix it. I don't even know how it could help, since most of its questions were about keyboard layout, and it didn't even help. My third and last question is: How to reconfigure X server, if the problem is there?


Thanks in advance!

I'm not that familiar with Debian, but live and livefailsafe are probably different sets of options that are passed to the kernel. You could examine your live cd and see what options livefailsave passes and then add those to grub.conf or lilo.conf on your installed system.

How can I "examine" my live CD?

ok altho I am not familar with mint....the answer is the X server....which is the graphics and how it is displayed.

normally failsafe mode.....means do not load any special extras like nvidia graphics but load vesa graphics which is more basic which explain in another way....that you will need a better xorg.conf file.

2) so choose your live cd....lets say mint....when it is at the menu stage .....there should be an option to edit the kernel line.....

add this to that kernel line

vga=ask

hw detection on boot will then look for a (good but basic) resolution to give you.

3) if vga=ask fails for you....try vga=791 or vga=793

and other numbers are here under ......linux video numbers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions