[lug] No GUI after upgrading to Mandrake 9.2

[D. Stimits]

John Dollison wrote:

> 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?


You have your X11 config file set for hardware acceleration in 3D. The 
hardware accel, however, requires being compiled against the current 
kernel. Note that there are 2 relevant packages for X11, one being the 
X11 module, the other being the AGP module. The X11 module is 
kernel-independent, but AGP is not. You need to set it to non-hardware 
accel, or else compile the AGP module against the current kernel (and 
this is hardware specific). For example, people often talk about how 
nVidia cards are proprietary drivers...this is only half true. The AGP 
code comes full open source, and can be compiled against any kernel. The 
X11 module comes precompiled, and is not open source; the only part that 
has to be recompiled is the AGP module, so there is no need for nVidia 
to release an AGP module that goes with every version of kernel and 
kernel config.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net