Hi,

I have just installed sarge and couldn't get over 800 x 600 in either gnome or kde. So I went to the irc channel debian and asked the question and got told that I needed to install the nvidia drivers. Ok, saw the link here and downloaded the run file. Problem is that it won't let me complete an install because the xserver is still running, ok I thought, using my old Unix skills I did an su root and then an init S - then the installer complained about being in single user mode! Frustration building How can I stop the xserver starting? I assume it is something in the inittab - what runlevel doesn't have the xserver?

thanks

davej

This will get you into a console mode and you can install the drivers. If you are not using gdm just substitute it with the name of the login manager you are using. When you are finished installing the drivers and configuring your graphics card, as root do to restart your login manager.

ok - got the gdm stopped - now I get a message that the installer is unable to find the kernel source tree for the currently running kernel.

How do I get one of those? I did an install of a downloaded ISO - single disk.

Ok, never, but never run linux without installed kernel sources, or at least kernel sources' headers. You can install it with

# atp-get install kernel-headers-version_number

Replace version_number with correct version of your kernel headers. It's the same thing that is wroten after kernel-image package that you have installed.

ok ta. The last Unix I installed came on about a dozen diskettes labelled N1, N2 etc

ummm atp should be apt I think

hmmm, ok did all that, installed the nvidia driver, made the changes to XF86Config-4 but startx didn't. So I changed the nvidia back to nv and added 1024x768 to all the screen references and voila - I have 1024x768 - not sure why the nvidia driver didn't work though.

Thanks to all that helped

Would you mind saying why. I have never heard anything about it.

I didn't got the point behind that
Kindly enlighten as to why kernel SOURCES are so compulsorily needed?

thanks

deb http://people.debian.org/~rdonald/nvidia modules-unstable/i386/

Ok the solution - well for me anyway, this may or may not work for others but it might point you in the right direction, the same way that a lot of responses here did for me.

After being unable to start the xserver and setting the driver back to nv I did a little more searching on the net (gotta love google) and came up with the following procedure

1. Made a backup ccopy of sources.list and then added these lines
2. I then ran an apt-get update
3. Next I did the following:
4. I then re-edited my XF86Config-4 file and changed the nv back to nvidia - still failed
5. I followed the instructions at the top of the XF86Config-4 file
and selected nvidia as the card. I also deselected the modules GLcore and dri - I remembered reading that on the nvidia page.
6. Did a /etc/init.d/gdm stop and then /etc/init.d/gdm start and voila - a pretty nvidia logo

Now steps 1 and 2 were shamelessly borrowed from http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-35225.html
The rest was just me following my nose and using the pointers given by various contributors here. Thanks to everyone who responded, I hope my little epistle here will help someone else.