I ran into the same issue when upgrading from wheezy to jessie today on an age old IBM R30.
I could solve it without recompiling by upgrading xserver-xorg-video-trident from 1:1.3.6-2+b2 to 1:1.3.7-1+b2 which is available in testing(aka stretch) now (as of 2016-04-17) compare https://packages.debian.org/de/jessie/xserver-xorg-video-trident and https://packages.debian.org/de/stretch/xserver-xorg-video-trident I used apt-pinning to keep dependencies consistent. It updates quite some other xorg stuff (54 files, see below) I didn't care for details, because it was the last hope before a fresh reinstall. Looks like it works like a charm :-) Maybe it would be nice to provide this approach in a proper backport to jessie (supposedly aka "stable")? Wolfgang Rosner ======================================================== some Details: On boot (the first boot after dist-upgrade), you see a short flash of console login, and then the screen gets dark. Machine responds on ssh login, but keyboard is dead. I could narrow down the issue by disabling kdm on boot. Starting kdm manually reproduced the problem I found this line in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log : (EE) TRIDENT: Failed to load module "xaa" (module does not exist, 0) Googling it dropped me to this Bug page. The driver manual ftp://www.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.0/doc/trident.4.html lists the chip - "CyberBlade series i1" - still as "supported" ---------------------------------------------------------- root@wr-laptop:~# lspci .... 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 5d) root@wr-laptop:~# cat /etc/debian_version 8.4 root@wr-laptop:~# cat /etc/apt/sources.list .....[snip]...... # testing aka stretch deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free root@wr-laptop:~# cat /etc/apt/preferences Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: -1 Package: * Pin: release n=jessie Pin-Priority: 900 root@wr-laptop:/etc/apt# apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-trident: Installiert: (keine) Installationskandidat: 1:1.3.6-2+b2 Versionstabelle: 1:1.3.7-1+b2 0 -1 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ testing/main i386 Packages 1:1.3.6-2+b2 0 900 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main i386 Packages root@wr-laptop:/etc/apt# apt-get install -t testing xserver-xorg-video-trident ...... 54 aktualisiert, 5 neu installiert, 2 zu entfernen und 2462 nicht aktualisiert.
