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Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void
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MEPIS Novice   
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Post # 290788
 Upgraded video card leads to black screen of voidHello, all. Nice to be here. I am enjoying MEPIS after having tried various other distros. I have hit upon a snag, though not a tear-my-hair-out critical one.
I am running a Win XP/ MEPIS 8.5 dual boot system. Celeron 2.5 ghz, 768 megs RAM, 19" Proview LCD... so a friend at work gave to me a video card - NVIDIA GeForce FX - a while back. I thought that I'd try it out this weekend, see what happens... So I powered down, inserted the card and turned things back on. As I expected, Windows burped, shifted into 800x600 for a while until it found a suitable driver; one reboot later, no problems. Then I tried out Puppy Linux 4.3, it looks like it worked just fine, had no troubles as far as I could tell. Then I tried out the new (?) version of CrunchBang 10 live cd. Again, hardware detected fine, no issues. I had hopes that MEPIS would behave roughly like Windows and just bark and re-probe the hardware or something. But no go. I get past GRUB by using the "vga=791" trick, I then do the CRTL-ALT-F1 thing so that I can watch menu items go by with "OK" statuses, but just as it gets to the login screen, I get a big screen full of nothingness. So, I guess my question is: is there a way to force a new X configuration? Alternatively, I can use Puppy Linux to alter one of the login scripts or configuration files if I need to. If absolutely necessary, I can unplug the card and just "revert", but I hope that won't screw anything up worse... Obviously, I'll provide any other information that would help and any information you all could give will be appreciated. Thanks in advance! Cheers. :wq! Last edited by Atari RedBeard on Sun Dec 11, 2011 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total. |
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| Sun Dec 11, 2011 11:10 pm |
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MEPIS Enthusiast  
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Post # 290789
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void
Boot to the Live CD and use the X-Windows-Assistant to repair the graphics. It is designed for exactly these kinds of situations. (And it's missed in M11.) _________________ Asus M4A87TD USB3 AMD 870 Socket AM3 Athlon II X4 630 2.8GHz Quad Core GeForce 9500 GT 1GB PCIe, nVidia TwinView Kingston 2G x 2 1333 DDR3 WD Caviar 500GB x 2 SATA hdd |
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| Sun Dec 11, 2011 11:15 pm |
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MEPIS Novice
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Post # 290794
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void [SOLVE Wow, thanks, Uncle Mark!
SOLVED... At least mostly solved. Sure enough, booted the Live CD as root (I used the 'mount as read/write option-not sure if I needed too, though) and ran the Assistant, there is a checkbox area where you choose which partition to apply the changes, and that was practically it. Well, I'm not sure that I am getting all the benefits of the new hardware, but that can be investigated later. For the time being, I am back in my system! Yay! Uncle Mark, You Country! (which is like You Rock!, but turned all the way up to 11)  :wq! |
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 12:29 am |
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MEPIS Enthusiast  Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 5:54 am Posts: 9172 Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma U.S.A. Has thanked: 2711 times Have thanks: 574 times
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Post # 290797
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void To get all that can be gotten you might try sgfxi. It's a Command Line script that's easy to use. Full instructions are on this page: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php?title=Sgfxi
_________________ "There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders." Alan K. Simpson |
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 3:13 am |
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MEPIS Rules!   Joined: Sat Oct 21, 2006 4:07 pm Posts: 479 Location: Northamptonshire, UK Has thanked: 20 times Have thanks: 15 times
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Post # 290800
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void I concur with lucky9. I was messing around with kernels this weekend. I got a black screen but dropped to ctrl+alt+f1, installed smxi and used sgfxi to get me back to full graphical goodness.
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:16 am |
 
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MEPIS Enthusiast Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 5:54 am Posts: 9172 Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma U.S.A. Has thanked: 2711 times Have thanks: 574 times
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Post # 290811
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void The directions in the wiki are very good. It's also about the easiest way to get comfortable with the non-GUI Linux. The downloading is all Copy&Paste. Not a bad idea to print out the directions if you're a first-timer at the Command Line.
_________________ "There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders." Alan K. Simpson |
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 8:19 am |
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MEPIS Enthusiast
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Post # 290852
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void [SOLVE
Sometimes I get lucky. _________________ Asus M4A87TD USB3 AMD 870 Socket AM3 Athlon II X4 630 2.8GHz Quad Core GeForce 9500 GT 1GB PCIe, nVidia TwinView Kingston 2G x 2 1333 DDR3 WD Caviar 500GB x 2 SATA hdd |
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 2:57 pm |
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Administrator  Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:17 pm Posts: 8751 Location: Rochester NY Has thanked: 581 times Have thanks: 956 times
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Post # 290853
Re: Upgraded video card leads to black screen of void [SOLVE
Sometimes?  _________________ Forum Rules Guide - How to Ask for Help Link to Wiki Rich Acer Laptop 5750G: Intel i5, 4 GIG mem, nVidia GT540M/Intel integrated graphics Kubuntu 13.04, KDE 4.10.2 M12 Alpha 2 in VirtualBox |
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| Mon Dec 12, 2011 3:01 pm |
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