It would appear that on Jul 5, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook did say:
I'm still hoping that the issues I'm having with mc etc... are related to nomodeset rather than deeper issues. I ran a few empirical tests BTW and fount that if I start mc before I access more than 2 or 3 tty[1-6] consoles it will start. And I discovered that if I don't try to execute a subshell at all from any of them I can log in to all six console screens and have my .bash_profile get processed. But once I start spawning subshells, all bets are off. --<<snip>>-- But anyway since it doesn't look like nouveau will work properly in console mode for me, I tried black listing it... Then probably, I thought, I'll have to follow the instructions in the Nvidia wiki entry when I try to get x working. But I found that I'm still having issues in the consoles with respect to subshells and mc. I'm beginning to think I'd be better off reinstalling with the 64 bit iso... It won't likely solve the nouveau issue, but I might get back fully functional console logins.
Well I did that. But the 64 bit version was having the same problem with the consoles... UNTIL: After I installed nvidia (which required the xorg server) So I went right on ahead and added all the pacman -S commands suggested in the beginners guide for installing X plus xfce4, then followed the install instructions in the enlightenment & e17 wiki pages... added a couple of things I was sure to need and rebooted All the console issues with failed .bash_profile executions and problems with subshells and mc all went away. Probably they were symptoms of not having a working video card driver in place??? On another note however, I had managed, just prior to installing nvidia, to get gpm working in the console via "gpm -m /dev/psaux/mice -t ps2" And accordingly edited the /etc/conf.d/gpm file to include: GPM_ARGS="-m /dev/psaux/mice -t ps2" But after rebooting with a working nvidia driver the CONSOLEFONT: "sun12x22.psfu.gz" still fails to load. (No problem there I'm getting an 80 column display so I don't need to load larger console fonts...) But more irritatingly: Now GPM fails to start. And I can't start it manually either... Could it be that the nvidia drivers xorg dependency is blocking gpm in the console??? Too bad, I like using gpm's copy/paste functions, and wouldn't have minded setting up a /root/bin GPM init command with the correct string to activate it when wanted, even if I needed to gpm -k before running startx... One other odd thing. When I tried to "man gpm" it complained that /usr/bin/less didn't exist. So I symlinked it to /bin/less and man started working... ???? ... Anyway I set my {user} ~/.xinitrc for a minimal e17 start-up and startx got me there. And the mouse worked as expected there... But I'm too tired of all this to bother configuring all my e17 keyboard shortcuts etc... So I'm done for now. Thank You one and all for the kind hearted suggestions! -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>