On 2012-05-14 19:26 +0200, Paul Johnson wrote: > On a Dell Precision workstation, there is an Nvidia Quadro card with a > weird connector in which we have a "dongle" thing that provides plugs > for four monitors. I've been running RedHat Linux 5.5 for a while and > decided to try the Debian net installer > > The graphical install proceeds as usual (I've done Linux installs at > least 50 times), the packages install, the grub install is fine, the > system restarts, I choose Debian, and some lines display very quickly > before the monitors turn off. In the graphical installer, the mouse > and the display work fine. Unlike the olden days, the installer never > comes to a "configure X11" section, it never asks me to choose a > driver or whatnot. So I have no idea what settings it has assumed. > > I've rebooted and in the kernel line replace "quiet" with "text" and I > can see more messages scroll by quickly, but very early in the process > the monitors turn black. I have no way of knowing if the system is > running in the dark, I've tried to ssh into the system,but there's no > answer. But, then again, I don't know if the sshd service is running. > > I see various posts about the black screen after startup issue, but I > don't find anybody who seems to understand the cause.
Those have different causes, but often there's a miscommunication between the monitor and the kernel graphics driver. Probably that's the case here, since KVM switches often provide incorrect data. > If you know what to do, or if you can give me some of the proper > terminology to describe this problem, then I can Google some more. > "black screen of death" was my first guess :), but that leads to a lot > of posts about Windoze :) To get a running system, boot with the "nomodeset" kernel parameter, hopefully this gets X up with the vesa driver. Cheers, Sven -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87r4umbr5u....@turtle.gmx.de