A.R.S. KA9QLQ Alvin Koffman schreef:
> Well I'm stumped. Every time I boot the live cd it gets to where
> Gnome should start then the monitor goes off. Does any one know what
> video drivers the live cd uses? Alvin
>
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What video card do you have and what drivers?
I've had similar problems (not with this graphical live CD, since I
installed Gentoo before it existed, but with X applications and X
itself), because I have an ATI card. ATI cards do do that (just shut
down the monitor) if 1) using the wrong drivers ("radeon" when card
model is one above the 9(2/5?)50 (sorry, can't remember which model is
the stopper for the Open Source drivers), and/or 2) DGA is enabled for
the fglrx drivers (this will do exactly what you described; it has many
times for me, and it is just one of the many PITAs with the fglrx drivers).
The thing is-- in theory, I have no evidence to support this-- that
GNOME (I am a GNOME user as opposed to a KDE user, though I don't use
either of those DE's regularly or "first" during a new install due to
their size) appears to require 3D support be working in order to load
properly. Or at least, the hardware acceleration must be working if
you're using drivers that supposedly support said acceleration. As I
said, I have no evidence for this /per se/; it's just my theory based on
experience. If you're using the 'vesa' drivers (which don't support 3D),
I betcha GNOME will load fine (at least it always does for me), but as
soon as you load drivers in your X config that are supposed to support
hardware acceleration/OpenGL/3D, GNOME will break if that support is
broken (even though, afaik, no basic operation of GNOME actually uses
3D-- that's why this is a "theory" and seemingly rather a crackpot one,
but it's the only theory that fits my experience).
So I would suggest first changing your xorg.conf to load the vesa
drivers, which should load (that's what they're for, default drivers
that should always be able to load and display), then editing your
xorg.conf to resolve the "obvious" problem that it must have. Some
option or driver causes your video card to stop sending a signal. I know
that >=9600 ATI cards do this when DGA is enabled on the fglrx drivers,
and also that >=9(2/5?)50 cards do strange things when using the
"radeon" drivers which don't support these models for hardware
acceleration, as opposed to the "fglrx" drivers which do-- but the
LiveCDs will tend to (in my experience) recognize my 9800SE as an ATI
card and load the "radeon" drivers incorrectly because the "fglrx"
drivers that the card needs are not open source... and the "radeon"
drivers don't actually work properly for my card. But you may have a
different brand of card, or it could be a different option causing this.
You might want to copy /var/log/Xorg.0.log to a backup location before
you try to start X with the vesa drivers (since the vesa drivers should
load correctly, it will overwrite the log with the errors and you need
to know what they are, so backup the log with the errors first, is that
I'm suggesting).
But the first thing we'd have to know is what is the video card, and
what are the loaded drivers; then we can work on things like what video
options you set in the kernel, and what you've got for modelines and the
like in xorg.conf (though I doubt that the issue is modelines, since
that just knocks you out fo X completely with a "no screens found"
error, not kills your signal between video card and monitor while
leaving X actually running).
Anyway, hope this helps.
Holly
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