I am trying to help my brother get Slack up and running over the phone. It's installed, and will boot to a promt, but he can't get to X. It seems to be video problems. I have had him run various commands to try and narrow it down. The biggest problem, is I don't know how to make output from a command (such as dmesg) stop when the page is filled and wait for a key to be pressed to read more. It scrolls the entire output and all we can read is the last little bit.

Here is something the end of the dmesg output:

video adapter vesa vga
mode colsrows
0 0f00 80x25
1 0401 80x50
2 0f02 80x43
3 0f03 80x28
4 0f05 80x30
5 0f06 80x34
6 0f07 80x60

i810_rng; rng not detected

His mobo has the intel i815 chipset with integrated video. It seems like his screen res is not configured properly, but of course 'cat XF86Config' runs to the very end and we can't see any of the video modes. When we try to pass the linux=vga733 option @ boot (for 800x600), it says 'you passed an undefined mode number'.

Any ideas on the problem and how to pause the screen?

You should be able to just 'shift-page up' to scroll back. If nothing else, do 'dmesg | grep -i relevant_stuff' to narrow it down.

Also 'dmesg | less'. Try 788 or 787 - I think 733 *is* undefined. I use 773 (1024x768x256)

The undefined mode number is because the VESA-modes aren't supported by the kernel. Because the VESA-"engine" is experimental you have to turn "prompt for incomplete code/drivers" in menuconfig. Still the VESA-enginge has nothing to do with X who has its own graphics engine.

If you want to read all of XF86Config just open it in an editor (such as pico, jed, jove, vi, vim etc etc).

If you want to read the whole dmesg output just make a file called whatever you want:
$ touch [filename]
and then:
$ dmesg > [filename]
after this, open the file, PRESTO! There is the dmesg output...

It seems like Linux is unable to locate his videocard, but I don't know why =(

Cool, thatnks. Kind of a 'brand new' type question, but I never had to do any serious troubleshooting without being in X and using a terminal with a scoll bar

We were trying grep, but apparently didn't think of many relevent words to help, lol. I got him looking again....

I did the dmesg > filename, but we still didn't know how to scroll so it didn't do any good We're back at it now...

Also, I recompiled my kernel last night and remeved a TON of modules that support the i8xx chipset. That's why I am troubled by his problem. His chipset seems to be well supported by the default kernel config in the basei kernel...

Ok. Here's whats happening now: When he types startx, the screen goes blank for a second, and then gets some vertical dark green lines about an 1/8" apart. ctrl+alt+bkspace gets back to a prompt, and shows the error "ERROR SIGLL caught!"

Anyone have an idea what this might be related to?

Right now I am having him install Mandrake 9.1. That should do all the autoconfig stuff properly, and then we'll try using the xf86config from there in slack.

We never did figure it out. We spent all day going through stuff. Slack detected his exact make/model of his monitor, had the right video driver loaded, the h/vsync, refresh were all correct. We went through the entire xf86config file 20x. My head is pretty spent right now, so I can't even remember what all else we checked, but it was a lot. In the end, he wound up installing Mandrake 9.1. I had sent him my old Mandy cd's just in case, because of it's excellent autoconfig ability. We even switched the xf86config files. Nothing worked. If he wasn't 700 miles away I would have went over and made it work, but after 6 hrs on the phone today and 8 hrs last weekend I give up.

I'm sure after a few weeks we'll give it another try