Hi all
I decided to try out Debian Etch after using Suse for quite awhile but ran into problem right at the beginning.
After setup and restart, the system won't boot into desktop. All it does is blink the screen 3 times and then put a text window with error inside.
Now, I did my research and found an article that said the dri module could be the problem (NVidia gfx card) so I unchecked it via dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg but no luck. So I went and checked the log file and the end part of it says :
And that's it.

My gfx card is NVidia GeForce 8600 GTS - and it actually isn't listed in "compatibility" list in log file (in the long list of recognized gfx cards).

So any of you Debian experts willing to help?

This is a fairly new videocard and you'll need the latest nVidia drivers from the nVidia site: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html To get you to a workable desktop (at least for now) reconfigure the xserver-xorg package as you did before, but select the vesa driver and a 800*600 resolution.

No luck
Chose VESA and 800x600 as highest available resolution and now I can't even go to text mode anymore.
What happens now is that when GDM should be starting, the screen goes blank and the system, well, dies on me

Have you tried the beta driver?
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree8...14.06-pkg1.run

Try the single user mode (second entry) when booting with grub and at the login prompt enter your root password now whether the the version of the nvidia driver you can get in Etch will support that card I don't really know you need to have non-free in the line that you use in your /etc/apt/sources.list like this.

Changing the line to reflect yours in the file for Etch now you need to apt-get update or aptitude update depending on which you use then install the nvidia-kernel-common, nvidia-glx, nvidia-kernel-???? packages matching your running kernel then restart the machine after having changed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to use the nvidia driver. If the does not support the card then you can try with unstable with a line like this.

Commenting/removing the non-free from the etch line then updating again. Now you would install the module-assistant package and run as root m-a prepare to download and link the kernel headers for your kernel then make sure that the build-essential package is installed and run the command m-a a-i -i -t -f nvidia (you would have wanted to purge the nvidia packages from the etch before doing this) hopefully this will build/install a nvidia kernel driver for you kernel if successful then install the nvidia-glx and nvidia-settings packages and reboot/restart X.

I'm having the same problem, only with an Nvidia 9800 GTX. I tried to install the Nvidia driver, but it said I needed the development packages. (Which when I did this in Ubuntu, if I remember right, was "libc6".)

I am unable to download them, however, because I access the internet through the program "wvdial" - which was not installed, apparently.

Any way to work around this? I have all three Debian install DVDs, plus the update DVD (all current as of about three weeks ago). However, the install program never asked me for any of the other disks, despite the fact that I selected all the software categories (other than "Laptop") when it asked me what I wanted to install.

Ideas, anyone?