[arch-general] screen goes blank on reboot after 1st pacman Su of new install!!!???

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2010 at 08:15:26AM -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

> But in any case even when I do get X working I won't allow ANY display
> manager to control my boot/login process. If they take away startx I'll
> likely give up X before I'll use GDM, KDM, Entrance (etc...) Any graphical
> login prompt always makes me so uncomfortable that I forget why I was
> booting the durned computer in the first place. Heck I even insist on a
> text based grub menu for similar reasons. When I'm ready to put up with a
> GUI, I use startx, and not until...

I'm using XDM which is relatively painless compared to
GDM, KDM and friends. With a modified 'Arch' setup it
can be made to look nice. 

Hint: once you have RL3, make sure you have the network
and sshd configured and running before doing anything X11.
That way you can always log in from another machine if 
startx leaves the system in an unusable state. It can
save a lot of rebooting time...

I wonder if you aleady have nouveau installed. Do an

lsmod | grep nouveau 

to check.

Nouveau is the new open source driver for Nvidia cards.
Unlike nv it is a kernel module, not an Xorg driver and
that can be confusing if you're not aware of it. If it
is installed, it will be used even before you start X,
and the only way to prevent that (if you want X to use
another driver) seems to blacklist the module in
/etc/rc.conf.

The failing modeset could be because you have nouveau
and it's doing the wrong thing, or because you don't
have it... 

For X you will have the choice of nv, nouveau, or the
proprietary nvidia driver. Nouveau is reported to work
well, but on some systems I had to revert to nv to get
usable audio latency. This seems to depend on the video
card type as on other audio system here nouveau works
just fine.

Ciao,

-- 
Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais
nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait.
(Michel de Montaigne)