[lug] No GUI after upgrading to Mandrake 9.2

[John Dollison]

I just learned a very important lesson today:  If it's not broke, don't fix
it.  (I will probably learn this lesson at least once a month for the rest
of my life, but that's a different story.)  Anyway, I had a fully (mostly)
functional dual-boot system running Mandrake 9.0 and Win98.  I decided to
upgrade to Mandrake 9.2.  Installation seemed to go fine, but when it came
time to reboot, things went awry.  Here's what happened:

The lilo graphical loader came up, and I selected 'linux'.
Stuff started loading normally, as far as I could tell.  Lots of green OK's.
At the point where I used to get my graphical login screen, I instead got
several flickers on the screen, like it was trying to come up, but then I
got dumped at a text-only prompt:

     Mandrake Linux release 9.2 (FiveStar) for i586
     Kernel 2.4.22-10mdk on an i686 / tty1
     localhost login:

At this point, I logged in and tried 'linuxconf', and made sure that my
runlevel was set to 5.  I wasn't sure what else to check (yes, I'm still
pretty much a newbie).

I then tried 'startx', and got the following message:

     Log file is /var/log/XFree86.0.log
     Using config file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
     Using vt7
     (EE) MGA(0): Static buffer allocation failed, not intitializing the DRI
     (EE) MGA(0): Need at least 4608kB video memory at this resolution, bit
depth
     Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'

I checked out the XFree86.0.log file, but don't really understand most of
what I see there. Of course, anything that says "Fatal Error" is potentially
important, but another thing I noticed was the 4608 kB memory requirement.
I also saw something in the log file about configuring AGP.  I have an old
Matrox Mystique 4096kB video card with a PCI interface, so I think that's
where the problem lies.  Problem #2 is that I don't have much experience
tinkering around with Linux when it's not working.

My system is home-built:
Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard with a PIII-500MHz CPU
256MB RAM
4MB MGA Matrox Mystique PCI video card
SoundBlaster Live! soundcard
KDS VSx-7e 17" monitor

Any ideas?
--
John D.
Westminster




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