MEPIS Community Forum

Been away and using other distros and now trying to get M-11 working again. Like B-4 11.9.70 fails to install on my sys but 11.9.60 will install. After install I need to run sgfxi to install the 173xx nvidea driver for my fx5200 card but ALL attempts to start a terminal out of x fails including at bootup so I cannot start smxi or sgfxi to do the legacy install. I remember this problem from way back but do not recall if a fix was found for it. I have googled it, searched the wiki and other distro forums for a resolve and found nothing that works so far. At bootup I get a floating error box about screen resolution out of range and by the time that passes the system is already booting the default kernel so I'm not able to choose anything else and at the login screen if I choose console login it just loops me back to the login box again. From the desktop any attempts to start a terminal out of x like cntrl-alt-F1 gives me a black screen with blinking cursor... at that point the only keyboard input that works is cntrl-alt-F7 which takes me back to x or cntrl-alt-del which of coarse reboots the system. I have already tried the typical suggestions like editing grub and grub.d header files and the changes make no difference. I installed a couple of earlier kernels to try but the out of range resolution error at bootup prevents me from trying them. This is on my desktop sys a P4 3ghz w/3gb ram & HP w1707 flat monitor that needs 1440x900 res... (the sys settings for display shows the correct res of 1440x900) but still get the error at bootup. My current booting kernel is 3.3.2-mepis-686 and kde 4.8.4 with sid repos enabled. I upgraded to this point in attempts to get a working console but no luck with that yet just my first wasted day back clearing one hurdle after another trying to get a fully operational system. Any help appreciated.

hi,

i think i found it here, took awhile .
easy...

this post might interest you as well. good to see you around .

Hey loco!, thanks very much. That did the trick to get the consoles back. Not so lucky yet getting nvidea going but I can live with that till I find a resolve. I tried a couple of the tips Kent suggested but am still getting the floating box at boot about resolution out of range so I cannot yet even try to boot the nvidea legacy kernel yet. Thanks again... I'll post the fix when and if I get it resolved.
P.S. I also thank Tim for the fix... don't know how he ever figured that out!

Why are you back using 11. Just curious.

Michel

Because 11.9.70 won't complete the install on my sys but 11.9.60 will complete and I'm not subscribed so the latest is not yet available to try for me. I may yet become a subscriber or just donote if it looks like Warren is going to apply some effort to Mepis success more than I've seen so far. I attribute most advancements and resolves made to Mepis to this community for a very long time... sad but true anyway.

As far as I know M11.9.70 is still the latest.

With my fx5200, when it tries to use the nouveau driver, I'll get a black screen with a "Sync. Out of Range" message floating around if I don't add "video=VGA-1:e" to the kernel options line.

To use either the vesa driver, or the proprietary nvidia driver, add "nomodeset nouveau.modeset=0" to the kernel options line. The LiveUSB's "Safe Mode" boot also uses the "nouveau.modeset=0" option.

I was referring to the announcement on the index page about a new alpha and thought it was newer than 11.9.70. On the other problem.... I'm booting from hard drive with 11.9.60 installed and at bootup the resolution error is persistant and I never see the grub screen before the boot is already in process booting the default kernel. To boot a different kernel I'll have to change the kernels place in grub or find a workaround for the floating error box that blocks out the grub boot screen.

You mean you don't get the initial grub screen menu with at least a M11.9.60 entry and a memtest entry, and it automatically starts booting?

As soon as all the initial bios boot related stuff is done try pressing either the up-arrow or down-arrow keys, that should disable any timeout that was causing a automatic boot to start up.


edit: If I recall correctly M11.9.60's grub screen menu was rather difficult to see because of the color combinations used for foreground text, highlighted text, and the background. The grub screen menu in M11.9.70 with Henry's (Utopia) artwork is a lot easier on the eyes.

hey big guy ,

i think he's saying he doesn't see a grub screen at all.

found > here > it's a tad older but should be the same principles. check /etc/default/grub easy...

if it doesn't help you can reverse the changes and run update-grub again. a little curious why the newer alpha doesn't want to boot i think these problems have been corrected.

How do you run a 'update-grub' if you can't boot it? I wonder if you could you boot from a different partition (or LiveUSB) and edit the M11.9.60's /boot/grub/grub.cfg file with that change?


From what JBoman posted earlier it sounded like he was able to boot M11.9.70 but he had problems with the installer.