Black Screen after running 'xstart' on Debian install
 

I unloaded the KDM/KDE package and was starting it per instructions by first running 'startx'. My screen went blank (i.e., black) and that's all I get after reboot.


Thanks, Tom

Do you mean startx?

Can you give us a copy of /var/log/Xorg.0.log please

Thanks, I changed it in my post.

No worries, I was just making sure that we were on the same sheet here, but yeah, lets see what that log file says; that should have the errors

I used a rescue CD to boot from and cd'd to /var/log but there isn't a Xorg.O.log?

are you doing this on the actual drive it's self? And thats a zero, not an 'oh'

OK, got it ... /var/log/Xorg.0.log

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "... the actual drive it's self?" I think the answer is yes.

The background... I loaded Debian 4.0r3 (Multi Arch) on an AMD Athlon. The install kept getting hung on the part where you load the extra packages (Print Driver, GUI, etc...) so I unchecked all to get the basic system loaded and operational.

I then when online and found a KDE install and downloaded it. Before running the environment the instructions said to run "startx". From that point on my display doesn't work.

So to get a look at the log file I booted from a Rescue CD and 'thought' I cd'd to the /var/log dir.

So I guess the question is: Was I looking at the CD directory structure or the Drive structure???

By the way, thanks loads for the help. I'm thinking, that while it may be academically interesting to solve this problem, it may be easier to just reinstall...

Nah, thats coward talk, you may as well learn this now, you may not have an X issue again, but troubleshooting is always a skill to have.

When booting a rescue disk, the root filesystem you see is the one of the rescue disk; you need to mount your actual disk and navigate through that.

The bottom few lines (tail -20 or so) of the X log file should give a good reason for the fail, it may be you just need to reconfigure X, it may be that even removing the config file and allowing X to start a new one helps.

OK James (Jim??), I hear you... I loaded this to learn more about things like configuring X-Term, so here we are!!

Update....

Thanks, I thought that I might be looking at the Dir of the boot disk and not the HD.

I got a tip to try Ctrl-Alt-F1 and/or Ctrl-Alt-Backspace; F1 worked but Backspace didn't (someone said that F2 would work also). This brought back the login prompt.

So now I have /var/log/X open and have one error: "(EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable".

I looked on the site and found an answer for this same problem: 11-13-07, 08:31 AM "AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable" There's lots of stuff here that will keep me busy for a bit.

I looked on the DRI Wiki - Troubleshooting and they said to check...

$ dmesg | grep agp
Linux agpgart interface v0.101 (c) Dave Jones
agpgart: Detected NVIDIA nForce2 chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @0xd0000000

$ dmesg | grep drm
"NOTHING"

So it looks like my DRM is not configured correctly... Naturally anything you have to add would be appreciated.

Tom

I think it might be worth trying to reconfigure your X setup:

1. Login after Ctrl-Alt-F1
2. Run this: "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg"
3. Complete the steps and once completed, reboot.