Michael Sullivan schreef: > On Sat, December 31, 2005 4:44 am, Rumen Yotov wrote: > >> On (31/12/05 01:49), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> >>> Earlier tonight I changed the setting in /etc/conf.d/rc for the >>> RC_DEVICE_TARBALL from "yes" to "no" and rebooted. Now I can't >>> get into GNOME. For my personal account after I enter my >>> username/password the screen clears and I see the default >>> background color and my mouse pointer, then nothing else. I can >>> move the mouse pointer, but there's nothing the click on and the >>> context menu doesn't come up when I right-click. When I tried to >>> log in as root from the welcome screen I see the "GNOME Starting" >>> box with the Gentoo logo, but it never goes on from that. To get >>> out of both my personal account and the root account I had to >>> Alt+Cntrl+Backspace. I got a Failsafe Terminal and looked at the >>> log files for gdm and saw this: >>> >>> (EE) GARTInit: Unable to open /dev/agpgart (No such file or >>> directory) >>> >>> There are five log files in /var/log/gdm; they all say roughly >>> the same thing, and their timestamps are consistent with the >>> times I tried to log in and got stuck. I can't even find out why >>> it's looking for this file or how to make it stop looking for it. >>> Can anyone help me out here? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing >>> list >>> >> >> Hi, Are you using a Nvidia video card? Reverting RC_DEVICE_TARBALL >> to "yes" should solve the problem but it's not a solution. udev >> isn't creating the /dev/agpgart file/link - check if it's there and >> with what perms. Rumen >> > > > /dev/agpgart does not exist. As far as I know I am not using a > Nvidia card. If I was I think I would have a /dev/nvidia as well as > several other similar /dev files starting with nvid, but I don't... >
"As far as you know"? Do you not know what video card you have in your box? This is not really a wise policy in general (not knowing what your hardware is), but especially not when running Linux. But anyway, here's the deal. AGPGART is the device representing your AGP bus, which bus (slot) most likely holds your video card (unless you have an onboard video chip, a PCI video card, or use PCI-E, which you might, but most likely do not, as the vast majority of systems in use today use an AGP video card). AGPGART is a motherboard resource, which is part of the kernel. What may have happened is that you upgraded your kernel at some point and did not enable agpgart in the kernel config, and/or did not enable specific support for your motherboard, but this was not noticed because the previously-existing device file was in the tarball you were using. However, when you stopped using the tarball, because the modules were not present in the kernel, a new device could not be created (because no module/driver was found to create the device necessary). This is, of course, all speculation, but I can't offhand think of any other reason that /dev/agpgart would not be created, other than that the module isn't loaded, and the most likely reason that that would happen is because there is no support in the kernel enabled. However, this could also happen because the module isn't explicitly loaded because either coldplug is not installed, and/or the module--if compiled as a module-- needs to be in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.* and is not there present, and/or the module-- if compiled directly into the kernel is not loading because the kernel itself does not have support for loading modules enabled. But these are all somewhat less likely than agpgart support not being enabled in the first place (which is itself fairly unlikely, but since you are not getting the device being created, there must be *some* reason that that isn't happening). What Rumen is talking about is a specific quirk of nVidia cards using the proprietary nVidia drivers, that the device must be created in local.start because the device is for some reason not created automatically (I don't have an nVidia card, so I don't know the details). There is also a specific quirk of ATI cards using the proprietary fglrx drivers, that agpgart must be compiled into the kernel as a module, but your xorg.conf must be specifically set to either use the kernel module or the module included with the fglrx drivers; the two are incompatible and the fglrx drivers may or may not work if you use the wrong one. The reason you can get into a failsafe GNOME session is because that uses the 'vesa' video driver, which is practically guaranteed to provide a basic display (it's basically like Windows Safe Mode, doesn't run anything except what you absolutely need to have enough of a session that you can fix whatever's wrong). However, a full GNOME session requires the driver specified in your xorg.conf to load, which it most likely cannot, because your AGP bus is not loaded, so X is unable to communicate with your video card (which is on the AGP bus, which is not accessible, because the device file does not exist). So what we want is to cause this device file to be created, which would mean that we have to know somewhat more about 1) what kernel you are using 2) how it is configured 3) what specific hardware exists in the system (which impacts the configuration of the kernel). For the time being, I would suggest re-enabling the tarball in /etc/conf.d/rc, so that you can have a fully-working system while you determine the status of Device Drivers=> Character Devices=> /dev/agpgart (AGP support) in your current kernel config, and the nature of your motherboard and video card, so that you know what the correct settings for your system actually need to be. HTH, Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
