X Server won't start, /dev/fb0 not found, clean install of Debian Squeeze
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X Server won't start, /dev/fb0 not found, clean install of Debian Squeeze
I completely repartitioned and reformatted and did a clean netinst of Debian Squeeze in hopes of eliminating the problem I posted last week
Now matters are worse.
I am getting the error that X Server has failed to load because of a problem with the graphics device (Radeon 7500) and then it politely offers to show me the logs and then drops me out to a shell prompt.
According to the logs, /dev/fb0 does not exist.
xorg.conf does not seem to exist either.
I have attempted installing the packaage "firmware-linux" as suggested in this bug report but no candidate package existed.
Output of lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Inte
rface (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P PCI to AGP Controller (rev 02)
00:06.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P Processor to I/O Memory
Interface (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Contr
oller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Contr
oller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Contr
oller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Contr
oller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Cont
roller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Brid
ge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller
(rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 0
2)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon
7500]
02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controll
er (rev 02)
Oddly enough, after trying 'startx' again just to see what would happen, GNOME did come up but runs too painfully slow to use. According to 'top', nautilus is using around 50% of the cpu, and Xorg is using anywhere from 20 - 30%.
<ctrl>+<alt>+<F1> killed gnome and returned me to a terminal screen where i can see the last few entries going into Xorg.0.log, but has yet to give me any kind of useful prompt, (after about 15 minutes.)
I have been able to SSH in from my laptop and from what I can tell the contents of the log are exactly the same as the one I posted above so no idea why it wouldn't load that time but did this time.
e: I'm not sure hardware is the best place for this now so I have posted it in the Debian distribution forum. Hope that's alright vv
Your dmesg doesn't indicate that the radeon kernel module is getting loaded at all. Was X running at the time you ran 'dmesg'? What is the output of 'sudo modprobe radeon'? After you run that, do you get any output from 'dmesg | grep drm'?
First, sorry for abandoning the thread since Monday. I had a nasty cold and have been out of the office.
I was sure that dmesg output was from an X session but you are correct, it was not. Here is 'rest' of dmesg that I got after 'init 2' which resulted in the same failure to load that I get with a reboot. Sure looks important.
[ 380.866062] pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 387.469001] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 395.146195] [drm] radeon defaulting to userspace modesetting.
[ 395.189679] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.31.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
[ 397.062395] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge
[ 397.063124] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: bridge is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 397.063853] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 397.073791] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 397.711948] [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[ 397.721989] [drm] Loading R100 Microcode
[ 397.736478] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R100_cp.bin
[ 398.314284] radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R100_cp.bin"
[ 398.314712] [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[ 454.019953] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge
[ 454.027308] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: bridge is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 454.028040] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 454.036691] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 454.651536] [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[ 454.660574] [drm] Loading R100 Microcode
[ 454.676594] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R100_cp.bin
[ 455.070292] radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R100_cp.bin"
[ 455.070727] [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[ 510.243381] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge
[ 510.244114] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: bridge is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 510.253509] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 510.255190] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 510.875573] [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[ 510.884935] [drm] Loading R100 Microcode
[ 510.900594] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R100_cp.bin
[ 511.298634] radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R100_cp.bin"
[ 511.299090] [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[ 1439.899241] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge
[ 1439.899977] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: bridge is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 1439.909055] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 1439.910734] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 1440.549533] [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[ 1440.551788] [drm] Loading R100 Microcode
[ 1440.568603] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R100_cp.bin
[ 1440.962311] radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R100_cp.bin"
[ 1440.962738] [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[ 1668.241250] gdu-notificatio[2036]: segfault at c ip b7838bbe sp bfa0a010 error 4 in libgdu.so.0.0.0[b782f000+1d000]
modprobe radeon had no output whatsoever and 'dmesg | grep drm' produces pretty exactly what you see above.
In other news, I added the non-free repositories and still no such package as 'firmware-linux'. It looks like I need some kind of firmware package, just don't know what it is called.
Well you are missing the necessary firmware. You will need the appropriate Debian package for it, but I really don't know what that is. Your problems could be unrelated to the lack of firmware, but that's certainly the first thing you need to resolve before debugging this any further.
I found another site telling me I need 'firmware-linux' which actually linked to the package on debian's site, where it appears to now be named 'firmware-nonfree' instead. Going to try installing that and see if anything catches on fire.
e: or maybe that is only the source and 'firmware-linux' is still the correct name for the non-existent binary? I haven't worked with source packages before. Ugh, I'm such a n00b.
ee: Ok, found binary version firmware-linux-nonfree, installing now.
Ok, after installing package firmware-linux-nonfree, the xserver still fails to start and gives me the same behavior. dmesg output now looks like this.
The freeing invalid memtype error certain doesn't look good, but I don't see anything in the log file that suggests that Xorg is crashing. Exactly what are you seeing when you run 'startx' from a console?
Well, it's complicated. The behavior seems to depend on what state the machine is in at any given time and whether or not it uses xorg.conf. (details on that below.)
When first entering rl 2 (either during boot or from rl 1) when the x server tries to load, (this is with NO xorg.conf) the screen goes black for a bit, then returns to the command line. It repeats this 3 times trying to load X, then gives me a blue screen with the message "Failed to start the X server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly. Would you lke to view the X server output to diagnose the problem?" followed by yes and no buttons. Clicking 'yes' shows an abbreviated version of Xorg.0.log, which ends abrubtly with:
When I exit that, It prompts me "Would you like to view the detailed X server output as well?" yes / no
a 'yes' here will display the entire Xorg.0.log, which does not contain that error line at all from what I can tell.
When I exit that. I get the message (still on blue screen) "The X server is now disabled. Restart GDM when it is configured correctly." Hitting 'OK' here dumps me back out to a shell login prompt.
NOW, I can run startx from the command line (again without a xorg.conf) and the desktop WILL eventually load, but it takes forever and runs so slow I can't use it for anything. According to 'top', nautilus is consuming the cpu. <ctrl>+<alt>+<backspace> does nothing from here so I have to kill X with <ctrl>+<alt>+<F1>, which kicks me out to the shell but freezes there never giving me a prompt. Now I have to log in via SSH and kill the 'startx' process before the server itself will give me a prompt. It should be noted that the server never actually completes the transition to run level 1 here and in fact leaves many gnome processes still running that should not be.
Now about that xorg.conf. It did not create one during the install, so I ran X -configure and let it make a new one in /root/xorg.conf.new. When I tested that (X -config /root/xorg.conf.new) it just went to black and crashed and I had to do a hard boot. Needless to say I have not yet copied that xorg.conf over to /etc/X11
Please let me know if there is anything I should attach here. xorg.conf.new? I can probably get Xorg.0.log from any specific state mentioned above as well.
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