Mark Allums wrote: > Dwijesh Gajadur wrote: > > I recently bought and installed a PCI ATI Rage 128 Video card on my pc. > >... > > And then the screen goes black..nothing appears. > > I have tested the video card on windows and it works well. > > > > I also want to run debian on non-graphical mode..I did not install any > > desktop environment.I want to run it on command line as a server. > > Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and see if a login prompt appears. If it does, the > machine is trying to start X and failing. I would try to get X running, but > if you don't want X, you should probably check and see if a DM (such as > lightdm) is installed, then go from there.
If no X was installed using Ctrl-Alt-F1 won't exit it. Since no desktop was installed the going black is probably the kernel's bitmapped framebuffer at boot. Try booting with nomodeset on the kernel command line and see if that improves things. To do that interact with the grub boot loader and add that to the boot command line. Newer Linux kernels now set the graphics modes very early in the boot process. This is something that used to happen with X starting but now happens by the kernel at boot time even without X. It enables the kernel to present boot splash screens and allows switching between X screens and kernel screens without changing video modes. And when the graphics is not supported it tends to break things. Using nomodeset instructs the kernel not to do this and to use the BIOS modes instead. Using nomodeset now breaks X because X now relies upon the kernel mode setting. But it should get your text console working again. Hopefully. Give it a try and see. Bob
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