Dear Folks, I have been using Debian AMD64 Lenny on my dual boot laptop (Windows Vista on the other partition) for quite a while now. After a recent Lenny update when I booted up it couldn't get the gnome window environment up. It moaned about the new kernel not having been doctored to work with the NVIDIA graphics card etc.....
If I can't be arsed to modify the kernel and the rest of the rigmarole required to get the NVIDIA card working then I usually just use the mv command to change the name of the xorg.conf file to back up name and let the OS make a new cooked up xorg file and use VESA or whatever and get gnome working without proper NVIDIA support and not give a monkeys etc. This has worked many times in the past for me. But now when I threw the old xorg file away then when I booted the machine again it crashed again with the xorg errors etc but now in VESA mode and then it went to a blank screen with a little cursor in the top left hand corner and never gave up the ghost as it had done before I changed the name of the xorg.conf file to then leave with a terminal prompt..... It just froze instead and stayed with the blank screen and the cursor permanently blinking. crtlC and crtl Y and anything else I could think of couldn't get me a terminal prompt that I could type commands into for all the tea in China. The only thing I could do was to type ctrl Alt delete, reboot and then end up with same problem again. Eventually I had to fire up Windows Vista to power down properly (Oh no........................!). Is there a key I can depress after booting that will make the machine ignore the failed cycle of onanism I appear to have engendered here and give me a terminal prompt and I can then work on fixing this? Xorg and Gnome have worked well in the past and I have got them working both with the NVIDIA card and without. I think this is just a temporary problem. Regards Michael Fothergill
