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

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Jul 4, fons at kokkinizita.net did say:

> 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. 

What looks nice to me is the console login prompt...
Also aside from that, there's another reason I use startx (with a wrapper
script that copies the appropiate file to ~/.xinitrc depending on which
desktop...) Which is usually E17 which can remember where to put a konsole
window based {in part} on the "name" which I can feed to it with a
running terminal application via a line like this in the ~/.xinitrc...

konsole --workdir ~/mail --name F2alpine  --profile BlackGray -e alpine &

I've yet to find a DE that will remember enough details of a konsole window
in it's saved sessions method to prestart the correct application(s) in the
correct konsole windows etc... 

I don't suppose XDM can be configured to use a ~/.xinitrc like script that
will let me prestart selected terminal applications in a simular manor?

 
> 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...

Well I've evidentaly got the internet as fetchmail is working... Though it
said my comcast cablemodem connection to comcast's pop server was insecure.
It said something about verisign not being trusted?????????????????

sshd is another matter. My personal paranoia settings require NEVER
allowing ANY remote logins. If God himself want's to use my computer he
dang well better be using the attached keyboard, or there's gonna be
trouble... <grin>

> I wonder if you aleady have nouveau installed. Do an
> 
> lsmod | grep nouveau 
> 
> to check.

Since I haven't yet remembered how to get gdm working in arch, I redirected
that output to a file in lieu of pasteing it into the message. Since I
compose with vim that means :r nouveau.out

nouveau               477159  0 
ttm                    38517  1 nouveau
drm_kms_helper         21512  1 nouveau
drm                   131562  3 nouveau,ttm,drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit            4319  1 nouveau
i2c_core               15144  5 nouveau,drm_kms_helper,i2c_nforce2,drm,i2c_algo_bit
button                  3738  1 nouveau
 
> 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... 

 I say I'm not sure but I think the above output says I do have it and that
 it must be doing the wrong thing...
 
> 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.


Since this is my first Nvidia card AND I'm NOT a gamer, I woiuldn't know
what to do with any of the above. But since (I think) Arch now  favors,
ummnnn, What's it called? ahhhh, Oh good I found some of my notes: "KMS"
it would make sense to try to configure the kernal module driver first
wouldn't it? Is there a how-to that doesn't expect me to be a computer
science grad?????

By the way, I noticed a couple of odd things durring this "nomodeset" session.
Don't know if they are symptoms of problems or possibly the results of
having used the nomodxeset kernel option...

1) durring the boot, it said it couldn't load the sun12x22.psfu.gz font
I'd prespecified in my rc.conf... Actualy on the assumption that KMS was
going to notice my high reasolution monitor I figgured I'd likely need
something like ter-128n.psf.gz Like I wound up using in my laptop. But I
haven't installed the terminus font package yet... So the biggest I
expected to start with was one of the 12x22 fonts...

I note that even without loading the large font, I wound up with a large
text size on my hi-res monitor (yup an actual 80 column display) So maybe
the "nomodeset" option is why the 12x22 font didn't load?

2) a little more disturbing I note that when I switched to another tty and
logged in to another console session, it hungup without executing the
.bash_profile... If I hit ^C I got a default command prompt but my .bashrc
set command path wasn't working untill I used the bash command to open a
subshell... Could the nomodeset option be responsible for this???

3) WHA-DA-{censored} Now I notice I can't get mc to fire up. I used it
earlier in this login session, But now the tty just hangs, and I need to
use another tty to issue a killall mc to get my prompt back... I'm not sure
what changed since I started this Arch session. But something don't seam
stable...

-- 
|    ~-~   ~-~       Guess I just don't know.
|    <?>   <?>     Joseph (the Wordy) Philbrook
|        ^                  J(tWdy)P
|       ___             <jtwdyp at ttlc.net>

       <sigh>