Errors loading, Video and Wireless
 

Morning All, I am a totally new user so be gently with me I very well may break :D. I loaded Mandrake10.1 on a latitude c640, the install was really smooth but apparently I did something wrong with the networking and video. Now I only can boot to the shell, no desktop enviroments are loading. Is there was something I can do from shell to config or reload drivers without having to completely reformat Thanks for your help I am very sure I will have more questions. BTW the laptop has a addon wireless cisco card (pcmia and onboard NIC)

Hey,

First things first log on in the command line as root. To get your video going try:

startx

The screen should flicker a bit then a nice graphical log in should appear. If it doesn't and a message comes up saying the xserver has failed copy down the error messages and post them on here - there usually long so look for the bit where it actually says something has failed.

With the network card try in the terminal as root:

ifconfig -a

a list of your network devices should show up, copy what is output and post it here. You should get three names, something like:

eth 0
load of details ...

eth 1
load of details ...

lo
load of details ...

The eth ones are the actual network cards and the lo is loopback I think - I don't really understand what lo is for ;-)

What the model number of your wireless card??

Chris.

First, have you tried to run "startx"? It may just be set up to boot to CLI by default. If that fails, look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for lines starting with (EE). This would indicate an error in loading the X server. Ones near the bottom are more likely to be the fatal error that ended things.

Have you looked at any of the tutorials for setting up wireless networking via your Cisco wireless card?

lo is indeed the loopback interface. It is used for programs to connect internally on the system. (This is often used for testing purposes or for NFS/RPC issues, etc.)

Thanks for the advice: in between post I was able to get the desktop to load:
I was simply using the wrong command. The wireless card is a AIR-CB21ag-a-k9.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:9B:65:18
inet addr:10.216.168.217 Bcast:10.216.168.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::208:74ff:fe9b:6518/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1496 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:0
TX packets:491 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:478358 (467.1 Kb) TX bytes:159833 (156.0 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xec80

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1994 (1.9 Kb) TX bytes:1994 (1.9 Kb)

sit0 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

[root@localhost root]#

I would assume eth0 is the onboard, so not sure. More advice?


Thanks!!

Your card is supported by the madwifi driver I think, see here:

http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility#AironetCB21AG

I never used madwifi so don't know if you have to do anything unusual but if you download the driver from the web you get a nice readme and install file to tell you what to do.

Oh and thank you matir for telling me what the loopback is for.