[gentoo-user] Re: nvidia update problems

[walt]

On 01/03/2011 02:11 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Sunday 02 January 2011 15:51:24 walt wrote:
>> On 01/02/2011 03:51 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>>> It looks as though the boot sequence is going wrong somehow,
>>> because when I get my initial blank screen, if I then switch to a
>>> VT and restart xdm, everything works as expected.
>>
>> Just for clarification, are you saying that you can do that even
>> without re-emerging nvidia-drivers?
>
> Exactly so - without doing anything other than restarting KDM. This is
> an ~amd64 box, by the way.

So nvidia.ko is not the problem then.(Unless it's being loaded too late
in the boot sequence.)

>> Is there an X session already running before you restart
>> kdm?  (I don't use any of *dm, so I don't know if they are X apps
>> that require X to be running before they can write to the screen.)
>
> As far as I know, KDM starts X itself. At VT4 (which I use habitually
> for root logins) I issue the command:
>
> $ /etc/init.d/xdm restart&&  logout
>
> which starts the KDM session as normal.

I'm wondering if you have some mixture of baselayout versions on that
machine from previous updates.  A glance through the many relevant
files in /etc/env.d/, /etc/conf.d/, /etc/X11*, /etc/rc.conf, /etc/init.d
leaves me confused about what happens during xdm startup.

Could your machine be trying to start something other than kdm by mistake?
I.e., maybe you are starting kdm for the first time from the VT instead of
re-starting it?

I'd try "touch /etc/.noxdm" and reboot, then log in and do "/etc/init.d/xdm
start" again.  If that also works perfectly then I'd guess there is something
in the list of directories above that is mis-configured -- my guess would
be that the bootscripts are trying to start the wrong xdm -- just a SWAG :)