Help with installing Linux

Soldato
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Back to the problem at hand, no screens found means that the setings for the screen you set in the reconfiguration of the X-Server were not right for your screen- What you need to do is to find the specifications for your screen, and use the advanced configuration to set the refresh rates and available resolutions manually.
Hopefully this will help :)

-Leezer-

ok so how do i find out the information about my screen? All i know is that my screen is very very very old, and has a IBM sign on the front.

im trying to reconfiugre again and am again stuck at the point where i have to select the X.Org server modules that should be loaded as default. what do i pick? last time i picked GLcore

[EDIT]

ok not sure if i jhave but mihgt have narrowd it down on to what is set wrongly. It says in the log file this:

(ww) TRIDENT: no matching device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:0) found
(ee) No devices detected.

Does this mean the PCI thing is set wrnolgy. when configuring it is automatically as 1:0:0 so i leave it, how could i find out what it is?
 
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leezer3 said:
Twiddle.
If the guy don't have access to desktop, he has no root access without setting a root password!
The fake root access provided by Ubuntu is via GKSudo, which is part of Gnome. He needs to set a root password so he can use sudo from the console, without this he cannot reconfigure the X-Server.

Please don't spout off with inadequate info!- Earlier in the thread it had already been established that the X-Server/ display driver configuration was up the spout, and therefore attempting to start GDM will do absolutely nothing except confusing the situation.

-Leezer-

Crap, fake root access as you call it is handled in gnome by GKSudo which is a front end to sudo I believe.

From the sudo manual:

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser

Ubuntu during the install sets up your user as the permitted user in the case of sudo so you don't need to fart around with sudo passwd root to gain root access, I've got a kubuntu install running occasionally on this machine and I can use sudo with my own password with out any conflicts.

As for the "/etc/init.d/gdm start" thing, I thought addy_010 had sucessfully set up X and a better way to start it would be to execute "/etc/init.d/gdm start" instead of startx. Sorry to addy_010 for any confusion.
 
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you could try manually editing you xorg.conf file with

sudo nano /etc/xorg.conf

this assumes you have nano installed. Find the section related to the graphics card and change the driver to vesa.
 
Soldato
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enragedchip said:
you could try manually editing you xorg.conf file with

sudo nano /etc/xorg.conf

this assumes you have nano installed. Find the section related to the graphics card and change the driver to vesa.

ok ill try that now and report back, whats a nano btw?

my god i am looking at it and dont know waht the heck to do
 
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Nano is a command line text editor. There are lots of them (vi/vim, emacs, nano, pico, etc.) however nano is one installed by Ubuntu by default. It's probably the easiest out the lot with mostly Ctrl-<letter> commands.
 
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Open as above and you should just be able to edit. Off the top of my head (on Windows atm), when you are done...hit Ctrl-X (it will ask you to save), hit y (yes) it will then come up with a path (since you are opening a file which already exists, don't worry to much) so press enter and it should take to back to the console/terminal
 
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ok this makes no sense, i type in that "sudo nano /etc/xorg.conf" and i get a blank black screen and at the bottom is some writting saying things like "^G get help", "^O Writeout" etc. What do i do from here?
 
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enragedchip said:
Crap, fake root access as you call it is handled in gnome by GKSudo which is a front end to sudo I believe.

From the sudo manual:

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser

Ubuntu during the install sets up your user as the permitted user in the case of sudo so you don't need to fart around with sudo passwd root to gain root access, I've got a kubuntu install running occasionally on this machine and I can use sudo with my own password with out any conflicts.

As for the "/etc/init.d/gdm start" thing, I thought addy_010 had sucessfully set up X and a better way to start it would be to execute "/etc/init.d/gdm start" instead of startx. Sorry to addy_010 for any confusion.

:rolleyes: I'm perfectly aware of how sudo works.
However, it (GKSudo) will only work and this is the critical part through a Gnome dialog box. On a vanilla Ubuntu install, typing sudo into the console will ask you for the root password, which doesn't exist, & your password will do nothing.
The permitted users part you are referring to is the entry your user needs to have in the file /etc/sudoers before you are even allowed to use the sudo command- Attempting to use sudo without your user in this file will give you a no permission error.
To be totally precise, GKSudo is actually a type of fakeroot:
provides wrappers around getuid, chown, chmod, mknod,
stat, ..., thereby creating a fake root environment.

Once again back to the problem at hand- When reconfiguring the X-Server, there should be a default list of extensions- Leave these as they are.

The trident error you are getting tells me that you have the wrong driver for your card; Its simply saying that it can't find an appropriate set of bits in the driver file selected.
If you have the vesa driver selected and have left the modules selection at default, then the card is obviously something very odd- Please run lspci (This will list the devices in the system & thier connections) and post anything referring to trident.


Nano is a lightweight texteditor- This is the manual on the official site http://www.nano-editor.org/docs.php but I wouldn't reccomend that you try to play in the xorg.conf- This is the config file that
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
writes, and editing it will give you no advantages but simply more chance to get things wrong through mistypes etc. (There are some people who prefer to write it totally manually, but this is not something that I would reccomend a novice user goes anywhere near)
Edit #2: Besides this, enragedchip clearly hasn't tried playing with Ubuntu & the xorg.conf file recently- Its /etc/X11/xorg.conf !!!

Hope this helps.

Edit: Crikey, spent nearly 30 mins writing this post lol.

-Leezer-
 
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addy_010 said:
ok this makes no sense, i type in that "sudo nano /etc/xorg.conf" and i get a blank black screen and at the bottom is some writting saying things like "^G get help", "^O Writeout" etc. What do i do from here?

The contents of the xorg.conf file should be displayed on the screen. It should only show blank when you specify a filename which doesn't exist in which case it assumes you want to create that particular file.

EDIT: Path is wrong, try sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf (cause I'm not on linux right now, I didn't spot it right away).
 
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leezer3 said:
:rolleyes: I'm perfectly aware of how sudo works.
However, it (GKSudo) will only work and this is the critical part through a Gnome dialog box. On a vanilla Ubuntu install, typing sudo into the console will ask you for the root password, which doesn't exist, & your password will do nothing.
The permitted users part you are referring to is the entry your user needs to have in the file /etc/sudoers before you are even allowed to use the sudo command- Attempting to use sudo without your user in this file will give you a no permission error.
To be totally precise, GKSudo is actually a type of fakeroot:

As far as I am aware (and I have been using Ubuntu for over a year) - you use the same password whether you use sudo before a command on terminal or executing a program via GkSudo. The whole point of the sudo system under Ubuntu is the fact that you never know the root password. Both sudo and gksudo under Ubuntu read from the sudoers file and hence you use the *same* password for both. Hence the link sudo passwd root is not necessary under Ubuntu. By default, the user created during the install is added to the sudoer file. I speak from experience which is approximately 12 hrs of use a day for the best part of a year.
 
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Dunky said:
The contents of the xorg.conf file should be displayed on the screen. It should only show blank when you specify a filename which doesn't exist in which case it assumes you want to create that particular file.

EDIT: Path is wrong, try sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf (cause I'm not on linux right now, I didn't spot it right away).

Yup. See my post (Previous one) for this again lol! and a link to the manual of Nano. I will say this again though, there is no advantage whatsoever to writing the xorg.conf manually, & its only going to mess things up. If you post it though, we can run through it and see if theres something obviously wrong.

-Leezer-
 
Soldato
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leezer3 said:
Hope this helps.

Edit: Crikey, spent nearly 30 mins writing this post lol.

-Leezer-

That really is helping me, i really am appreciating everyones hard work, especially when its 30mins of there time.

Ok i did the lspci thing and there was ones that had the name trident in it, it says

0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i7 (rev 5d)
 
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Dunky said:
As far as I am aware (and I have been using Ubuntu for over a year) - you use the same password whether you use sudo before a command on terminal or executing a program via GkSudo. The whole point of the sudo system under Ubuntu is the fact that you never know the root password. Both sudo and gksudo under Ubuntu read from the sudoers file and hence you use the *same* password for both. Hence the link sudo passwd root is not necessary under Ubuntu. By default, the user created during the install is added to the sudoer file. I speak from experience which is approximately 12 hrs of use a day for the best part of a year.

Hiya,
Been on Linux scince Redhat 7, through Mandrake & Ubuntu from the inception (Not 12 hrs/ day, but certainly 2 or three), you do appear to be right; (Both passwords should work) Mind-you though, I do tend to use su rather a lot with kernel compiles etc, and I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that I use the server install & then add stuff over the top.
Admittedly, it is best practice to keep the root password away from 'n00b' (Apologies OP!!) users, but I'm reasonably sure that it first prompted me for the non-existant root password when I first ran upgainst a bust X-Server & I then set it, but this may well have been in recovery mode.

Some of the trouble is I suppose that I never play with default installs :p
Arrgh, my head hurts ;) :)

-Leezer-
 
Soldato
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i have typed in that X11/conf thing and got a lot of info, what parts should i type out?

says my busID is PCI:0:9:0

dis is all d info about my screen n etc:

section "Device"
identifier "trident microsystems cyberblade/i7"
driver "trident"
busID "PCI:0:9:0
end section

section "monitor"
identifier "generic Monitor"
option "DPMS"
horizsync 28-51
vertrefresh 43-60

section "screen"
identifier "defualt screen"
device "trident mircosystems cyberblade/i7"
defualt depth 24

does this help?
 
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Soldato
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addy_010 said:
That really is helping me, i really am appreciating everyones hard work, especially when its 30mins of there time.

Ok i did the lspci thing and there was ones that had the name trident in it, it says

0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i7 (rev 5d)

This thread is moving too fast :)
According to the X-Free 86 page, the correct driver to be using for your card is the trident driver- Run
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
again, and in the driver section select trident (This is one of the defaults with the X-Free 86 package), and leave the other settings at default, and hopefully you should be good to go :)

(The X-Free 86 compatibility page for the trident driver- http://www.xfree86.org/current/trident.4.html )

Cheers

-Leezer-
 
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leezer3 said:
Hiya,
Been on Linux scince Redhat 7, through Mandrake & Ubuntu from the inception (Not 12 hrs/ day, but certainly 2 or three), you do appear to be right; (Both passwords should work) Mind-you though, I do tend to use su rather a lot with kernel compiles etc, and I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that I use the server install & then add stuff over the top.
Admittedly, it is best practice to keep the root password away from 'n00b' (Apologies OP!!) users, but I'm reasonably sure that it first prompted me for the non-existant root password when I first ran upgainst a bust X-Server & I then set it, but this may well have been in recovery mode.

Some of the trouble is I suppose that I never play with default installs :p
Arrgh, my head hurts ;) :)

-Leezer-

Heh don't worry about it, just don't want to confuse those who are new to Linux. Wasn't trying to look down or anything since I know from your posts that you do know what you are talking about. Before Ubuntu, I was in the habit of using su and it did take awhile to adjust (although I could go back to su, it was probably sudo for a reason so I decided to go with that). However I have heard that sudo does exist in other Linux distros and they probably implement it slightly differently (i.e the user doesn't automatically get added to the sudoers list during install). Also Red Hat is known for not being completely consistant with other distros.


Anyway back to the issue at hand, quick way to exit nano and save changes is: Ctrl-X, y <enter> <enter> and should take you back to terminal. I'm guessing you could do as leezer says and do a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and select vga or vesa just to get you to a desktop.

Actually just had a thought, is it a PCI, ISA or Onboard gfx? If it's ISA then that could be the problem :/
 
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