Hello, all,

Probably did something unrecoverable, but thought I'd ask anyway.

I decided to upgrade to etch late last night (first mistake - don't do this at 2:00 am!).

I did this from GNOME - this is probably what caused the problem. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I know.

Now, gdm does not start. From the command line, if I try to start gdm, all that happens is a lot of flickering, and eventually I get an error message that no screens were found. Also, consistently, that the agpgart module is not loaded.

I've spent most of a beautiful Sunday on this, reading the Debian Wiki, and dpkg-reconfiguring xserver-org. Always comes back to the same thing. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks very much.

Lexia

Did you read the Release Notes before attempting the upgrade?

A few guesses on instructions you may have missed if you did not. Most critically, before upgrading to Etch, you should have upgraded the Sarge kernel. What video driver are you using? What video card? Are you sure gdm is installed? Did you do # aptitude dist-upgrade, as opposed to aptitude upgrade?

This checks if you have these essential packages installed and if not, fetches them for you

Yes, but as a relative newby, possibly with ADD, I didn't see much I could do differently than what I did (except of course the very stupid upgrade attempt from X11)

I'm already using the v6 option of the Sarge kernel. Should I have upgraded this too?

The video driver is an older one, I believe this one:
Intel Corporation 82815 CGC rev 02

I can start and stop gdm so I'm pretty sure it's installed.

I did do the dist-upgrade, after I did the update

Lexia

Thank you. I ran this as you recommended, but after checking the available packages, it says that it will not install anything, but only remove many packages, especially the xserver-xfree86.

I did read somewhere that removing the xfree86 server is the point of no return. It probably won't make any difference at this point, but since gdm appears to be installed but not working, I think I'll leave xfree86 there for now.

Lexia

Your problem is not gdm, it's the X Windows system and then specifically the xserver. Because it's not or at best incorrectly configured it cannot serve the graphical environment to the screen.

It does look like it and it looks like that kernel needs to be updated. Other than "no screens" found, the most consistent error message is AGP GART support not being available.

My kernel is 2.6.8-2-386, though. From the release notes, I'm not sure there's a bullet proof upgrade - the kernel-image-2.6.686 is listed as transition. I'll try that and see what happens.

The 2.6.8 kernel listed in Sarge is way, way too old. The best way to do this upgrade is to bite the bullet, change all references to sarge in your sources.list into etch, do the aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade routine and say a prayer Accept any dependencies, make sure you've made a proper backup of all of your data first. But you've already done that, haven't you...? In the end, check if all relevant xorg packages are installed with the command I gave earlier.

Looks like it, Dutch_Master. Have to do some real work now - will tackle this again when I have a free day, I've already wasted my entire Sunday on it.
Ah, Debian, the original time sponge!

Update: just couldn't leave this alone.

I did do another update and upgrade, and somehow got the unstable libraries in the fetch list, so it went and got (it looks like) the *next* upgrade. Seems to have fixed the server, so Dutch_Master, your suggestion was a bet in the right direction. Screen still flickers, but that's just, I hope, a reconfigure and reselect of the refresh rate, and I do miss Mozilla, the old style steaming mug for teatimer and oh, yeah, my worked out with sweat and tears samba configuration. BUT I have my X11 back!

Good thing this is my third most important computer, though - I do need it for some work things, but nothing I can't do elsewhere. Mostly its for having a (usually) logical, usually faster alternative to XP when I'm home. And now it's also a constant reminder to not upgrade on a whim, st 2:00 am and without reading the entire release notes first, and doing everything they say.

Lexia