Kill - kill - (X) kill

[Gtrax]

Its the new Lenny. It comes with Gnome (which I won't hold against it), but also with a respawning greeter that XP hacks would be proud of. Various combinations of..

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
init 3 (discover Debian's runlevels 2 thru 5 are the same)
Ctrl-Alt-F2 + new login - then
/etc/init.d/gdm stop (it says it stopped - but it gets going again by itself)

Eventually - a message that greeter has started 6 times and something is amiss, so it waits awhile before restarting the struggle.

Boot with "single" option.

All just do not work. Trying to install Nvidia drivers in this distro are the Linux version of "Ground Hog Day". I will get there somehow, but I do wish it was easier to stop and start X at will.

[MikeTbob]

Try adding a 3 to the end of the kernel line, during the Grub boot proccess.

[Gtrax]

Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe I fumbled, but it didn't work.

I boot from a GRUB list of choices in /boot/grub/menu.lst
The one that starts lenny is ..

title Debian LENNY 2.6.22-3-686 original kernel on sda10
kernel (hd0,9)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-3-686 root=/dev/sda10 vga=791
initrd (hd0,9)/boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-3-686

The boot line offered is vmlinuz-2.6.22-3-686 root=/dev/sda10 vga=791 to which I added a <space> and a '3'

The darn thing is nearly unbreakable. Do I need hacking skills to do this? I have read that Debian run-levels are different, and that levels 2 thru 5 are all the same. I don't understand what that implies.

I do know that if a have a kernel-sources present in /usr/src, with a symlink there called 'linux' pointing to the sources folder, and, with the downloaded Nvidia package in /root, I do the command ..

~# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.09-pkg1.run

Then I have a reasonable chance of getting an accelerated desktop. Allow that there is the making of a good /etc/X11/xorg.conf yet to get right also! I know that it can go wrong, especially the kernel sources must make a kernel of exactly the correct name and version. With this distro, you first have to win the fight with the log-in phase to get the chance to begin on the video driver.

[coopstah13]

kind of a hack, but just uninstall gdm and if you wanna use it reinstall after you do drivers, i dunno why you are having so much problems, should be able to switch to a tty and then login and run /etc/init.d/gdm stop and it should stop

[Gtrax]

OK - I think I got it. Previously I would have stopped the X server using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. That still works, but only for a few seconds, and it re-spawns in that window, even if you try to move on to another.

Doing it in the right order - as you suggest, does work, for which, my thanks coopstah 13.
The techiemoe recipe also mentions this way for getting NVidia drivers into Debian

The next hurdle is to make the kernel sources (needed by the NVidia driver to make its module), match exactly the gcc compiler version used to make the kernel supplied. In my case, the kernel was made with gcc-4.1, and the gcc I fetched using Synaptic is gcc-4.3.

Installing gcc-4.1 instead of gcc-4.3 is maybe a easier way than keeping gcc4.3 and compiling a new kernel.

[iwanabeguru]

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the X server doesn't stop it.

probably you still have gcc4.1 you just make a symlink to it named as gcc

[coopstah13]

i ran into this problem before i started compiling my own kernels

just install the right version of gcc that matches what your kernel was built with

then before you do

sh NVIDIA_DRIVER.bin

do

set CC=gcc-4.1

or whatever it needs to be