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Oh, $#@@+!
After I posted SEE 84 I had some time before tea so I decided to update the server... Now I can't get in!
I run Debian Linux so it's just two command lines, something I do every week:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Unfortunately, one of the things that got upgraded was the video driver for the weird cards I have in my terminals. Now I get a login screen that looks like I'm in the middle of a tornado with a 1990's computer... not good!
I'm having trouble fixing it as well. The only way I can get in (and write this blog) is to use a ten-year-old laptop with a dead battery. That means that accessing anything is real painful. That includes the internet, email, story files and software, config files to fix the problem. I'll drop in from time to time to poke around but I find the keyboard awkward to use so SEE 85 will be delayed until I can figure this out. Sorry.
-- The long story --
I run a package called LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Program) on my server. This essentially lets me use any other PC as a thin client, which is how I can use this old laptop. Everything runs on the server but the display commands go over the network and a basic system on the client renders it. Nice and cheap and almost anything that can netboot can be used, provided I configure it. Oh, and of course it is multi-user.
Recently I upgraded almost all my hardware and got two new boards for the main thin clients. These clients have no disk in them. The reason to update wasn't because the old boards were no good but these new ones use tiny amounts of electricity. I wasn't smart enough with the specs, though, and the video chips are weird. I'll know better next time.
I have a spare system which I use for test purposes. Okay, let's plug that in. Unfortunately, despite having done so before, it won't netboot now so I'm stuck with this old laptop. Grrrrr!
So, I'm stuck for a while. This is going to make it difficult to keep up any conversations (you know who you are).
Penny
Comments
Ctrl-Alt F1 sould get you to
Ctrl-Alt F1 sould get you to a login prompt (command line). At that point, you can try removing the upgrade, or just rework the video drivers.
I can't get more detailed, and I doubt you want me to try to get into your machine remotely to fix it :)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I wish it were that easy.
Until recent times configuring Xorg used to involve chickens, blood-curdling curses and equal measures of fury, confusion and intense disappointment.
Recent releases allegedly have the ability to figure out what video chipset it thinks you have and dynamically build an Xorg.conf file for you. This means that, whatever hardware you throw at it, it normally gets things (mostly) right.
Unfortunately, the video chipset in the boards does not have an open-source driver available. Up till the last update Xorg would do its thing, fail and default back to the VESA driver, which was good enough. Now, it finds something it thinks is right and loads the wrong driver. I don't seem to be able to force it to give me VESA, which means an unwanted debugging session. I wasn't joking when I said the display was a mess. Ctrl-Alt-F1 would just give me a different mess in about 1/6th of the screen.
Yes, I have ssh available on another host and I'll use that to hack my way out of the problem, I have no doubt. I just wish this hadn't happened right now.
Penny
blacklist
If you know which wrong driver Xorg is trying to use you could blacklist this driver to keep it from loading.
Martina
No such luck
The chipset is Intel GMA3650, which is a bought-in rebadged version of a PowerVR sgx545 chipset. The people who make PowerVR chips don't even tell Intel exactly how their stuff works. Code is slowly trickling through but there is no reliable Linux driver this side of a 3.9 kernel, so Google tells me. The internet is full of people who bought boards, laptops and nettops with this chipset and are regretting it, including me.
Previously this just used to cause Xorg to default to the VESA driver on X startup, which is good enough for my needs. Now, it causes the GMA500 driver, which is compiled INTO THE KERNEL, to get pulled in before Xorg even gets a look in. Needless to say the GMA500 driver doesn't yet have support for that chipset.
The thin client code which the clients boot lives on the server in a chroot. I would have a job building a new kernel in there, especially as my desktop clients are Atom D2700MUDs and my server isn't an Atom. Cross-compiling? Er, no, I wouldn't attempt it with a kernel. Life's too short.
Bah. Every option I look at - including replacing software or hardware - looks expensive in terms of time or money. To cap it all the motherboards have PCI slots and PCI video cards are becoming rarer by the day.
Thank you all for your concern.
Penny
To make Xorg use the vesa
To make Xorg use the vesa driver, all you need in /etc/X11/xorg.conf is:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Before Xorg gets a look in...
Not exactly true...
The trouble is that now Xorg has "defaults" and those defaults are to allow the kernel to automagically tell it what to use. However, Xorg does still allow overriding. Which is what Bibs has been telling you to do. Refer to his latest comment on exactly how to do this.
GMA500 is a lot like nouveau... Just where nouveau is for nvidia, GMA500 is for these Intel rebadges of PowerVR chips. They're both lousy attempts to reverse engineer what isn't being put out openly.
Not that it's entirely those projects faults... reverse engineering something is hard, and something as complex as a gpu harder still, and when the goal post is constantly being moved again and again by the designers of the chips...
IMO the real fault lies with these projects being deemed OK to build in to the kernel. They are clearly not mature enough and never will be due to their very natures.
Abigail Drew.
It's probably the nouveau
It's probably the nouveau driver. That thing has caused a lot of problems.
blacklist nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
lsmod to get a list of loaded modules.
you can also try to rename the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and let it build a new one (or go without)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
You could also try
...using another workstation and connecting through ssh if you are running it. ssh has saved me many a time when I couldn't get the local terminal to work at all.
Another way would be to boot directly into run level 3. You can usually select that from your boot loader, whether it be Grub or LILO or whatever.
Arwen
Grub2 isn't so easy to get
Grub2 isn't so easy to get into different levels. The startup should have the last kernel, which might change the modules loaded.
SSH is another way, but I was simply thinking of the easiest method to bypass the scrambled X system.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Penny
Is it fixed yet.
May Your Light Forever Shine
I'm back in
Solving this one with software isn't going to be easy. I'll just have to be patient and wait for the correct code to make its way through the system: I've seen reports on the net that it is coming, but I'm not holding my breath...
I have rooted through my box of spare cards and found a PCI video card of some sort - with a manufacture date of July 1997! With this plugged into my motherboard I can now get in. The available resolutions aren't so hot - the best I can manage (1280x800) looks huge on a 22" monitor! A decent card will have to wait till I have cash and PCI cards are not easy to find these days.
Still, that at least puts off the evil day and now I can get on with stuff. Where was I? Oh, yes...
Penny
Manually adjusting the VESA
Manually adjusting the VESA driver and resolution in the xorg.conf didn't work? Xorg should override all of the defaults.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Glad to Hear Your In
Mostly because I'm looking forward to more Somewhere Else Entirely . Your computing environment is much more complex than mine, but I do feel your pain a bit. I recently had two older PC's running XP Pro fail. I've replaced them with new Win 8 computers which have been a challenge as MS has made it a game of hide and seek to determine how to manage Windows 8. Fortunately, many helpful souls have put lots of Win 8 "how to" videos on YouTube.
Classic Start Menu (you can
Classic Start Menu (you can get it through ninite.com) is your _best_ friend for Windows 8.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Windows?
I have a copy of Windows 7 I bought just before everybody started only selling W8.
I keep it in a locked drawer of a filing cabinet in the basement, behind a door marked "Beware of the Leopard" ;)
Seriously, I have a copy which runs as a virtual guest on my server, for those peripherals which can only be updated using Windows. I'm looking at you, Logitech. I only run it about once every month, and then to update the patches.
Haven't used Windows for much else since I stopped doing IT for money in 2002.
Penny
Let's see. I'm running
Let's see. I'm running Ubuntu server, Kubuntu (on several machines), Windows 7 Home/Pro/Ultimate, windows XP (research and data recovery machine), Redhat 7, Windows 2000 (virtual machine plus at least one server somewhere), various android/ARM architectures, and a few others.
Needless to say, I'm still in IT.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Appreciate The Coments from Both of You
I prefer to buy it, turn it on, and have it work. I've spent way more time than I've wanted to over the years learning enough to keep everything running and secure. I can appreciate the satisfaction you get from learning the technology, putting your own equipment together, and keeping it running, but that's not me. I've pretty much gotten to the downside of the learning curve on Win 8. I'm good with it until the update (8.1) comes out. It would have been smarter for me to have bought new hardware and software at the end of the Win 7 era, but I'm an incredible procrastinator and didn't pay much attention to how different Win 8 was going to be. I knew I'd need to do something next spring, but that was still quite a ways off, but then the old boxes started failing. I still have a Dell laptop with a 1.8 Centrino & 1.5 gig of RAM running XP Pro that struggles a bit. I've been talking to an IT friend about taking the Ubuntu plunge with it. We'll see.
The end of support(security patches) for XP will be interesting. It seems like a lot of small businesses are still running XP (from what I've observed)..
Started the other end
I'll not go into great detail because this thread is way off any resemblance of a topic most site users would be interested in, but I came into this from the other end, so to speak.
I learned electronics, such as it was, early. I asked for, and got, a soldering iron for my 12th birthday. I built valve radios and other gadgets including working TVs before I left school. My early career was making printed circuits - gold, platinum, palladium and silver glazes printed onto ceramic and fired. Some of my work went into space aboard the UK's only ever home-grown rocket launch (and as far as I am aware, is still up there).
Then I went into IT, paper tape and Fortran 66 first, then cards and COBOL and finally timesharing. I soldered together my own microcomputer in 1979, and haven't stopped doing the hardware/software thing ever since. I have bought exactly *one* PC from a shop.
While I was trying to figure out how to fix the problem above I counted up the boxes in this room - which I call 'Mission Control'. I gave up at 14, although not all those work any more. Hey ho. As fast as I dump stuff I seem to accumulate more.
And now, having solved my problem at great expense, I must concentrate on writing.
Penny