Arch Linux

D.Marcus

Member

Registered: 2008-08-10

Posts: 5

Running Arch-LiveCD, but getting display anomoly

Hi. First post here. I don't know where else to post my question, so I thought I could start in this section.

I downloaded the Arch-Live Live CD a couple a days ago and gave it a spin, but ran into some display problem. I booted up the Live CD on my Twinhead laptop without hiccups, but then when I get to the login screen (I think it was the login screen), my laptop display went blank. Went I move my mouse around, I could  see white vertical lines responding to the mouse movements, but that's it.

I hooked up an LCD monitor to my laptop to see if it was my laptop's LCD problem, but the secondary LCD monitor (the one that I hooked up) gave me an error message saying that there was no signal detected.

I booted it up several times to catch any boot-time error messages that I could understand, and the only ones that stood out was during "Configuring the X Server", where it blinked once then produced the message "Error opening display!" a few seconds later, followed by "/usr/bin/find: Warning: you have specified the -mindepth option after etc, etc ".

The only boot option that worked was "Start Arch Core Live", which only boots up in non-graphical text mode.

Can anyone help/give pointers? I've looked through the Beginner's Guide and the Install Guide, but couldn't find anything that matches this problem.

Zerathidune

Member

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 102

Re: Running Arch-LiveCD, but getting display anomoly

What graphics card do you have? I've had issues with booting X with the catalyst drivers before, and I've found just doing X -configure doesn't produce a working xorg.conf. can't speak for nvidia though, as I haven't tried the drivers recently, or with anything but a geforce 6800. Usually with catalyst you need to use the aticonfig utility to get a usable config file. give us some more info about your system and how you set it up and we may be better able to help you. lspci output? what graphics card drivers are you using? /var/log/Xorg.0.log ? /etc/X11/xorg.conf?

D.Marcus

Member

Registered: 2008-08-10

Posts: 5

Re: Running Arch-LiveCD, but getting display anomoly

Hi Zerathidune.

1) For lspci, I got VIA Technologies, Inc. S3 Unichrome Pro VGA Adapter (rev 01)

2) My laptop does not use any ATI or nVidia chipsets for graphics.

3) There's no Xorg.0.log file. Maybe because I'm running the Live CD?

4) As for xorg.conf, there's a bunch of stuff in there that I have no idea what it does. But under the graphic devices section (I'm guessing this is where I should look for something), this is what I got:

Section "Device"
          Identifier "Videocard1"

          BoardName "Video device"
          Driver "vesa"

          Option "RenderAccel" "true"
          Option "DRI" "true"
          Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
          Option "VideoOverlay" "on"

          Option "TexturedVideo" "on"
          Option "Textured2" "on"
          Option "TexturedXrender" "on"
          Option "UseFastTLS" "1"
          Option "BackingStore" "on"
EndSection

Zerathidune

Member

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 102

Re: Running Arch-LiveCD, but getting display anomoly

make sure the package 'xf86-video-via' is installed, then regenerate your xorg.conf with X -configure, test it with X -config <name of generated file>, and if it it works (if you get a blank screen with an 'X' cursor, it worked) hit ctrl+alt+backspace to get back to the command prompt and move the new config to /etc/X11/xorg.conf it (you may be able to just edit the existing file, but it looks like you may have some unnessecary stuff in there beyond just using the generic drivers.)

right now you're using the vesa video driver, which is a generic driver that is supposed to work with just about any video adapter, but in my experience doesn't always. what the above will do is install the xorg dirvers specifically for your card, and running X -configure should autodetect the card once the drivers are installed.

good luck.