Newbie

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 08:15:44PM -0500, Bob Schmidt wrote:
> 
> New to the list. I just installed alpha core 1.0 on my DEC AS4000, it has
> 2ea 400mhz processors, 512mb of ram, with a S3 trio64 video card. The
> graphical install went fine (including first boot), but as soon as it
> restarted and booted up, (went through the boot process fine) the screen is
> dark, nothing at all. Any ideas?

Just guessing.  Sounds like during an installation and in the
'firstboot' process you were using 'vesa' video driver and running
'system-config-display' (as a part of 'firstboot') wrote you in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf a card specific configuration which is not so great
on your hardware - to put it mildly.

It is still possible that you actually have text consoles and keystrokes
like Alt-Ctrl-F1 will take you there.  OTOH if a video is messed up it
maybe messed up all over or your X server is gone and is not reacting on
a keyboard at all.  In the later case you still should be able to log to
your machine over a network if it is hooked up to such.

Boot into level 3 (just add 3 to your other kernel parameters), have a
look what is in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and try to produce a saner
configuration; possibly using 'vesa'.  While doing that you may want to
change 'initdefault' in /etc/inittab from 5 to 3 and try to start X with
'startx' while trying.  You can change that back later when you sorted
things out.  The fact that you installed in a graphics mode shows that
you can have X running your box even if not necessarily an "optimal"
mode.

'system-config-display --help' will show you options which can
be useful when trying to find a suitable configuration.

   Michal