Problem with XFree on an Inspiron 4100

[Vlad]

Well, I finally broke down and put linux on my Dell Inspiron 4100...not without ghosting the drive before hand, of course. The installation went without a hitch, and once I got disccd installed and let my Athlon 2200+ do the compiling for me all seemed well. I got X, alsa, samba, and all the basic packages installed.

X, however, refuses to run (correctly) even though the Xfree86 logs show a flawless startup.

I read the threads (such as https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=50574&highlight=laptop+black+screen) which suggested trying an earlier Nvidia kernel. I tried a number of them without success. I also saw in another thread that I should try "ignorning" some of the displays (the TV-Out, for instance) so I appended my config file appropriately.

Now, X will "start", and the backlight remains on, but it never actually shows up. I tried disabling accelrender and lowering the bpp, as well as trying the nvagp rather than the stock agpgart. Nothing has worked. I can kill X with Cntrl+Alt+Backspace, and then halt -p the machine. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm at my wits end =/

The kernel is gaming-sources-r3 with APM. Didn't enable anything fancy (and what I did I enabled as modules)...hardware detection looks like fine.

Vlad

[metalac]

how about trying to run X with the native nvidia drivers? see if that will get you anywhere.

also look at www.linux-lapotp.net and see if anybody has the same laptop as you, so they might have something on how to set up X correctly.
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>>>>> Ignorance is bliss <<<<<

[Vlad]

Thanks. Followed a howto and managed to get it to work. Guess it was some wierd setting :)