Linux Installation Advice

[MaxPower]

It gave you that error when you went to start X?

If so try running
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

and see if that does anything.

EDIT: You might also try updating your system. From the command line run
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

You'd then try to startx again.

Thanks for your help Billy but I have come to the assumption that my graphics card might be knackered because most of the live CDs don't work and crash on loading screens.

 

[Una]

Thanks for your help Billy but I have come to the assumption that my graphics card might be knackered because most of the live CDs don't work and crash on loading screens.

You want to try 'vesa' driver, boot up from livecd... when it goes to loading gdm get into a console ctrl-alt-f2 (for example) and kill gdm. Then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change your driver to vesa. Then sudo gdm again.

You can also do a text only install....

I doubt very much your GFX card is screwed, just a misconfigured system.

 

[MaxPower]

Thanks Una this appears to have worked. But why do I have to use this driver is there a problem with the ATI one? It seems very chuggy.

 

[Una]

Thanks Una this appears to have worked. But why do I have to use this driver is there a problem with the ATI one? It seems very chuggy.

Yeah its crap non accelerated but will get you into xwindows for now.

Could you post up /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/gdm/:0.log on the one that freezes. You will need to see if you can get a console using ctrl-alt-f2 (or something) and dump them somewhere.

You might want to see if you have the latest radeon driver and if not install that.

Make sure you got all the latest xorg etc packages as well,

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

 

[LizardKing]

if the updates dont fix it it might be worth trying this
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10
and restart, you may need to rededit the xorg.conf file back to the radeon driver

It downgrades your xorg package to a older version thats known to work

but the xorg logs would be a good place to start looking for reason behind the problem


Its all part of the fun getting linux to function, and by god it feels good when you do get it to work after 6+ hours of tinkering, not to mention all you learn in the process

 

[Bes]

Its all part of the fun getting linux to function, and by god it feels good when you do get it to work after 6+ hours of tinkering, not to mention all you learn in the process

As long as you don't do what I did and then bugger it all up to the point where you have to nuke your partition 30 minutes later