Member Avatar for mepnoob2005

If you are trying to start the new SimplyMEPIS 6.5 and it won't boot to a gui screen that may mean that it is trying to load the wrong video driver at boot.
Some things to remember to do at first boot, before you log in a demo....
1) Press f3 and choose the resolution that you want.
2) If you can't boot to a gui and you just get text log in then re-boot by logging in as root using root as a password and then re-boot. When the grub screen pops up just boot with the 'vesa' or 'small' option. You can always upgrade the vid driver once everything is shown to be working.

If booting with vesa or small gets you going then you may be able to upgrade the vid driver by going to kmenu, system, MEPIS, X-Windows assistant. If when you are tring to upgrade the video module you fail and you can only boot to the text screen then use the live cd and X-windows assistant to re-install X. Reboot without the cd and you should get a gui again. The newer nvidia cards will take the 'new' driver and the older nvidia cards may work 3-d well with the 'legacy' driver.
Here's a link to the MEPIS wiki with some good tips on video.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jbennet
jbennet commented: handy even if a little random +17

Dani AI

Generated

A compact, practical supplement to the advice already posted by and — focused on diagnosing what X actually reports and on safe recovery steps that avoid guessing the wrong driver.

Start by reading the X and kernel messages to see the real failure (look for errors, not just symptoms). Useful one-line checks from a root shell:

egrep "(EE)|(WW)" /var/log/Xorg.0.log
dmesg | egrep -i "nvidia|radeon|fglrx|i915|drm"
lsmod | egrep -i "nvidia|radeon|i915|fglrx|nouveau"
lspci -nn | egrep -i "vga|3d"

Interpretation tips: lines tagged (EE) are the important failures; a message like "module X failed to load" means the X driver expects a kernel module that is missing or mismatched. If kernel-side messages mention unresolved symbols or ABI mismatches, that indicates a proprietary driver was built for a different kernel and needs reinstalling or a DKMS rebuild.

Safe recovery checklist (non-destructive): back up the existing X config before editing; reinstall or reconfigure the distribution X packages rather than installing vendor runfiles when possible; prefer distro-packaged proprietary drivers (or DKMS) so modules rebuild automatically after kernel updates; restart the display manager (kdm/gdm/xdm) rather than repeatedly editing configs blindly.

Cautions and final notes: older GPUs often require a specific "legacy" driver family — verify the GPU model against the driver support list. If the system boots to text, capture the short error output and the small diagnostics above before making further changes; those lines are what will point to a correct fix rather than trial-and-error driver swaps.

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Member Avatar for TheNNS

well that's random

Member Avatar for mepnoob2005

So did you have a point to make or are you just trolling

Member Avatar for alienlinux

i'll agree with the latter

Member Avatar for jbennet

if it doesnt work after install heres what you do;

push control+alt+f2
login as root
type cd /
type cd etc/X11 (yes, in caps)
type nano xorg.conf

edit xorg.conf so that driver = vesa. By the way, for VirtualPC set colourdepth to 16.

hold down control + x to save
type logout
hold down control+alt+f7

hold down control+alt+backspace to reset the Xserver

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