Hi there,

Okay, I'll hold my hands up and say I moved to testing and broke my install! Why did I do it? I wanted to, thats why :-) Everything was working find and dandy and it was getting a bit boring, so I tried to get Xorg installed.

But now it's knackered.

So, my question is what exactly is the general (oxymoron?) procedure to fix a broken Debian install? I don't really want to just re-install, I want to get the satisfaction of fixing it!

I've managed to get XFree86 working, but that's it - I can start it by running /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 (or something) but it just displays the grey screen with the the cross mouse pointer.

Any help would be great!

You can do a lot of things:

1) dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
2) apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xfree86
3) apt-get remove --purge xserver-xfree86 and then apt-get install xserver-xorg
4) sometimes a good old apt-get dist-upgrade will fix a lot of problems

You can also try typing startkde (or whatever windowing system you're using) to see if that gets the desktop going. Then it's just a matter of finding the config file for starting that as default.

Well, that's something to go on.

Cheers for the help - i'll give it a whirl right now!

The first step in upgrading to Etch is changing from XFree86 to X.org.

Follow the procedure in this page:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/185

Once done that you can change the sources.list, so that you can use the repositories for etch/testing and then do:

Wooh Hoo!

I'm back in the game! Got it working again now! Excitement all round!
I'm in the Testing branch - I guess that's also known as etch yeah?

AND i'm running Xorg (my symbolic link in etc/X11/X is pointing to Xorg

Few things aren't 100% yet, it doesn't boot straight into a graphical login but I kind of like what I'm learning having to scramble about in the CLI.

Anyway, cool, thanks for your help fellas :-)


bye for now!

Actually I take some of that back - I don't seem to have hardware acceleration anymore... :-(

Cube now runs like a dog, a lame dog with it's legs cut off...

what video chipset do you have?

I have nvidia - a wickid Geforce4 4600Ti 128Meg ram.

I installed the nvidias drivers previously and they worked sweet as a nut.
But now, even though the Nvidia logo comes up, don't seem to be playing ball...


You got some ideas?

Have you compiled or installed a new kernel since the NVIDIA driver was installed? Anytime you upgrade the kernel, the NVIDIA driver needs to be reinstalled. What does the output of "cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status" give you? I'm assuming you're using AGP here.

output is:

Status: Enabled
Driver: AGPGART
AGP Rate: 4x
Fast Writes: Disabled
SBA: Disabled


So, it'a working right?

I'll try re-installing the drivers (seems a lame way to go but still)

I haven't upgraded the kernel myself, unless it did when moving to testing?

From my experience, upgrading to testing or unstable never upgrades the kernel automatically. Usually in Synaptic, the kernel packages will get moved into the "local or obsolete" section, and I'll upgrade the kernel myself. Before reinstalling the driver, you could try reconfiguring X with "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", and make sure all your settings are correct.

You might need to make changes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf since the file might have changed after you did the upgrade.

On a general note: yes, upgrading Debian sometimes breaks a few things in "testing" but never so critically as it renders the system unusable. And there are ways to get it back working, usually by running dpkg-reconfigure on affected packages.

Just to put this thread to an end:

In the end, I rebuilt my kernel and then re-installed my NVIDIA driver. I had to rebuild my kernel, as I had GCC 4.0 installed (and didn't want to downgrad) but my kernel was built with GCC 3.3 and NVIDIA required a kernel built with the current GCC installed.

It works now, but i've lost sound, if nobody can suggest anything i'll start a new thread.

Thanks for all your help everyone!

Just so you know, you can have multiple versions of gcc installed. You sound issue is probably due to something left out of your kernel build. What hardware do you have and can you post the relevant .config options for your soundcard?

I don't know what .config options I need to post????

I have SBLive! it used to happily use EMU10K1, when i do lspci, it's listed

0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 08)

when I do lsmod, it shows ac_97 in there? Could that be conflicting? I'm sure it wasn't there before (could be wrong though)

What else can I do?

I used the standard debian kernel config file to build the kernel, so there was loads of extra rubbish in there I probably don't need.