I'm having trouble getting Debian "etch" installed, the same as I've
had trouble getting any Debian based distro installed, and have had to
give up for the same reason:

This is a Gateway 2000 with a few upgrades, one of which is the
video card, an nVidia geForce FX5200 in a pci slot. The old graphics
card is not a "card" at all, but an onboard, hard wired i810e chipset
which I disabled in BIOS when I installed the nVidia card.

The nVidia 5200 works great with some Linux distros, like PCLinuxOS,
Vector, Fedora and others. It does not work with Debian based distros, however, and just stops at a black screen, frozen, at some
point during the installation procedure. Never a GUI of any kind.

I was able to get into xorg.conf using vi because I was able to log in
to root this time. In there I saw my deactivated Intel chip set as the
default graphics driver and display! Believe me, it IS disabled in
BIOS. Nowhere in xorg.conf is my nVidia graphics driver mentioned.

Anyway, I tried to hand edit xorg.conf and failed.. so I came here to
ask if anyone can post the display section of their xorg.conf file so
I can give it a try, as long as you have an nVidia card; how do I get
Debian to NOT see that stupid Intel legacy chip??

Thank you for reading this.. help would be appreciated, as I'm
eager to get Debian going on this machine.

-- Jerry

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=447415 may have the answer for you.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. That was a thread I found
doing my search here; but it ends unresolved, after several suggestions
that didn't fit the person's situation.

Thanks again.. I'm still hoping somebody will come along with their
xorg.conf posted.. I looked around google and haven't seen anything
that fits yet.

But I do hold out hope, mainly because Debian is the one disto that
I have not been able to successfully install. I keep hearing that it'll
be my default OS.. all I have to do is get it to install, though.

-- Jerry

Well, you'll never guess where I found a great xorg.conf file; http://people.debian.org/~srivasta//xorg.conf .. at the Debian site!

I'm going to print it out and give it a try by editing my xorg.conf file
with vi as root (I have to change out hard drives, right now I'm
using one with Vectorlinux on it).

I'll report back.. hopefully from my new Debian distro!

-- Jerry

Didn't work.. kept getting errors when I tried to "startx" after
editing.

Lost again.. I'm going to look around the Debian site some more..

What errors did you get? They may be fixable without starting again from scratch.

Hi - thanks for responding.. the errors came as basically, "No screens
found," or (after more editing) "Module 'nVidia' does not exist."

Stuff like that.

I just now tried to install the 8762 drivers which I downloaded from
the nVidia site. Here's what I did, starting with a working distro on
a different hard drive I switched to:

- downloaded and copied the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run
file to a floppy

- switched back to the Debian hard drive

- at the prompt during boot up typed in my root password

- mounted the floppy using mount /media/floppy

- cd /media/floppy

- sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run

I kept getting errors stating that there was no such file or directory.
Which is odd because I've run that scrip many times in other
situations.

Oh, well... any suggestions??

-- Jerry

Is the file set to be executed? Try and try it again.

Make sure that X isn't running before the install.

No, it's already executable.. I tested it on my experimental
hard drive first and it ran.

Is there something wrong with my install? I mean, is this behavior
normal:

- mount /media/floppy

It goes through the mounting process, with the light on the
floppy drive going on then off, and all the little sounds you
hear in there.

- cd /media/floppy

It shows me in the file there with the prompt root$/media/floppy

- sh <filename>.run

And then it says, "no such file or directory," even though it
put me there when I did "cd" to that file.

I tried:

- cp /media/floppy/<filename> /

and it came back, "cannot stat <filename> no such file or
directory," even though it shows that filename and dirctory as
the one I'm in at the time!

Huh?

after you cd /media/floppy
what so you see with ls (that is a lower case LS) or possibly dir
and if it is there I would use
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run
maybe????

I'll post my xorg.conf later tonight for you, as the backup doesn't format well in Notepad in Windows for some reason. Mine is setup for dual monitors but is pretty easy to change to fit your own set up. Last time I installed one I had no problem, this time has been a little more tricky for some reason. I had to install the Nvida-kernel-image package and then install the Nvidia driver, the new nVidia driver is supposed to automatically configure your xorg.conf for you.

Module nVidia doesn't exist is the error you'll get if you haven't compiled nVidia support into your kernel, or you haven't used the nVidia-kernel-image.

Hey, good idea.. I'll put my (failed so far) Debian hard drive
back in and give that a try (although sh always worked for
other OSs).

I'll post back. ..

thanx,

-- Jerry

You might also copy it off the floppy into your home directory or something. I feel like my debian setup doesn't allow executables to run from the floppy. Maybe check your fstab and make sure floppy has the exec option?

Ok, now I think that is getting to the bottom of the problem:

I get the "no such file or directory" whenever I try to do anything,
including copy the file from floppy to another directory, but not
when I cd to the floppy.???

In other words, I can go there but I can't do anything there.