In the normal USB boot I am not able to switch to alt-F3. alt-F1 brings me a list of errors and other non-interactive stuff and alt-F2 shows the GUI. alt-F3 does nothing at all. Since the F commands don't work I get the feeling X never loaded all the way. At this point in other distros I was supposed to get the log in screen.
How can I see which settings the usb boot is using in order to display X so that I could tell lilo to use that t too.
It's really strange that this problem has been asked around a thousand times and always the same wrong answer was given to so many people. In the feather forum there are soooooo many people asking the same thing. For some the "vga=normal" seems to do the trick, but for a lot of people that does nothing. Even stranger though is the fact that vga=ask doesn't change anything at all for me.
I have also tried to wait untill fluxbox should have been loaded and then press ctrl alt backspace, but nothing happens. Somehow I'm getting the feeling it doesn't evel load x... dunno. It's so dark in there so who can tell.
update:
Now I've tried re-net-installing debian etch. This time it gave me the usual random errors when installing stuff. This time however it happened during the installation of the base system. Therefore the entire installation took a few hours and lead to nowhere. I tried several times and every time the missing file was different. just great... ok. So that was distro number 4 that has failed. What next. I have tried debian, feather, dsl, delilinux and basiclinux. Every time something comes up during installation or booting. Debian was the only one that installed and booted. Too bad it doesn't install any more. Otherwise I would use it and cut out the excess bloat and optimize it for my purposes. Too late now.
I'll just return to feather since it seems the most promising to one. I re-installed (for the hundredth time it think). During the first boot I intentionally gave the wrong answer to the display questions in order to get errors and my precious terminal screen. Hahaa. At terminal at last. My first successful feather boot ever. I configured xsetup and gave it 600x800 resolution and 8 bit colours to be on the safe side.... well.... no. This time I got a *white* screen. Once again all commands were ignored so this means: no screen configuring is available.
Another update:
During start up major portion of the time is spent on displaying I/O errors.
end_request: 1/O error, dev 03:01 (hda) sector <whatever large number>
depmod: cannot read ELF header from /lib/... and so on.
hda: read_intr: error
I wonder if I'm entirely mistaken if I were to suggest my hard drive is busted? I just tested booting from usb and using certain options for xretup and then using the same settings for the hd boot. Every time the hd boot fails. I beginnig to think this has less and less to do with xsetup. I have configure xsetup in identical ways in usb boot and hd boot and the results couldn't be more different. There's something outside xsetup that's causing this black (or white) screen at boot up.
more updates
I ran fsck and found some unwritable blocks. Then I used
Code:
fsck -fvy /dev/hda1
and forced it it write on those areas. Once it finished (afer God know how many hours) it displayed the results and tehre were no bad sectors at all. Regardles of all my efforts the latest HD install of feather still shows these I/O errors at boot. I wonder what's goin on in there. Fortunately I can always boot to terminal by "tricking" it at xsetup.