xubuntu live CD works, but after install, can't start X

[aging_geek]

I have some old hardware (don't laugh!): 200MHZ AMD K-6, 256Meg RAM, Matrox Video Card, Old but good "KDS" CRT Display, Hawking Wireless card, serial mouse (no ps-2 or usb ports). I had been running Vector Linux 4.3 on it, but wanted to update to newer Samba and Wireless driver versions for compatibility and stability.

To test xubuntu 8.10, I booted with the xubuntu live CD. I was pleasantly surprised to find it worked nicely, including the Wireless card. The display looked good and the wireless card came up effortlessly and connected to my wireless router without any hassle. I had Firefox running, with wireless internet access, on the first boot. The mouse did not work initially, but I was able to get it working with the help of this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SerialMouseHowto, and by opening permissions on the mouse's serial port.

To my chagrin, after installing on the hard drive, it no longer seems to be able to recognize the video hardware, nor start up with a workable default X configuration, and the tricks in "SerialMouseHowto" don't seem to work to get the mouse going either. At boot, when starting X, it appears to be attempting to configure video hardware by trial and error, but then gives up with a dialog box that says it's running in low graphics mode and it then offers radio button options to "fix" it. With the mouse broken, that dialog box is hard to respond to except to click (tab->enter) "OK" for a low graphics mode. However, rather than just settling into a low graphics mode and continuing to boot, it then repeats the same apparently problematic attempts to configure video and then pops up that same dialog box again. At one point, after editing xorg.conf by means of cntl-alt-F1 and cntl-alt-F7 to get into and out of a text console, it repeated the trial and error and then gave me a display saying it couldn't identify my video or input hardware, or words to that effect.

So, I can boot into console mode and see the xorg.conf file, which looks very general and clearly does not work the way I had expected based on Vector Linux and Slackware experience. I get the impression from what I see there that xubuntu must use some other means to set video spec's, and I don't know how to deal with that. I suspect it involves two way communication with the CRT Display, and I don't think the old CRT can do that.

Can someone suggest a way to force the installed version of xubuntu 8.10 to function the way the live CD was working in terms of X behavior? The default video in that case was perfectly acceptable.

[D-cat]

If you boot with the live CD, does the livefs show a configured /etc/X11/xorg.conf that you can copy over the generic one on the hard drive?

If not, please post the output of lspci | grep -i vga and what is the max resolution of your monitor?

[aging_geek]

Thanks for the suggestions!

The response to lspci | grep -i vga is as follows:

00:08.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA 2164W [Millenium II]

The monitor is claimed to be "DDC 1/2B" compatible, but the Xbuntu installation routine seems unable to interact with it properly. If we were to set the Monitor mode manually, I would prefer the mode defined in the user guide as follows:

H(Khz): 46.875 V(Hz):75 Polarity(H/V):+/+ Resolution:800x600 Non-interlaced

Booting the Live CD takes forever, so I do not yet have an answer to your question about xorg.conf in that case. In any case, if there were a way to disable Xubuntu's monitor probing and instead force the desired mode, that would seem to be a good approach. Information I've found so far suggests that Xubuntu routinely probes and over-writes xorg.conf. If true, then in addition to defining a good xorg.conf, we need to also prevent the over-writing due to probing.

[aging_geek]

Update:

When running from the Live CD, the "xorg.conf" file still appears to be the completely generic one; i.e., it gives no indication as to how the video settings were arrived at, though the video looks OK, and the serial mouse can be made to work.

An additional factoid is that, while running in the Live CD Mode, I was able to get into the Settings Manager, which is a nice GUI running Xfce, and then set the preferred monitor mode (after having done the xorg.conf edits and the /dev/ttyS0 permisssions setting to enable the serial mouse). It appeared that the mode list reflected the actual modes available from the monitor. So, contrary to first impressions, at least in Live CD mode, Xubuntu did successfully communicate with the CRT hardware.

Having gotten that far by running the Live CD, I decided to invoke "Install" from the Live CD Desktop. My impression from reading Xubuntu documentation was that this would not work on a machine with only 256M memory. However, hoping that was another wrong impression on my part, I am trying it now. The hope is that the settings for CRT and mouse will somehow be retained from the Live CD session, thereby avoiding the difficulty encountered with the alternate install method. I seem to recall that, these days, video modes are actually set according to user preferences and, therefore, there must be a config file in the user's home directory that stores that info. It's a theory...

I will do another post when I see how that works out, a few hours from now...

[aging_geek]

The "install" from the Live CD desktop did complete successfully, thereby avoiding the hang up encountered with the other install method. Apparently, 256M of memory was sufficient. Perhaps that was helped by the fact that video memory is separate from the 256M in this particular machine. The mouse and video edits originally done in the Live CD session did persist through the entire install process. On reboot after install, the mouse was again non-functional, but only because /dev/ttyS0 permissions had reverted to restrictive settings. I fixed that again, reset the video mode by means of the settings manager GUI and all seems well, except for one thing... No sound. But, that's a different problem, for a different thread.

[aging_geek]

One last note:

The serial mouse continues to be a problem. The root cause appears to be the fact that Xubuntu restricts serial port access at every boot-up. Because of that, the serial mouse always comes up frozen. My manual procedure to fix it is get a console, login, change permissions by "sudo chmod ugo+rwx /dev/ttyS0", "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart".

Does anyone know how to prevent Xubuntu from restricting serial port access at boot-up? Surely there's a way, since we're dealing with "personal" computers whose resources surely need to be made available for personal use.

[D-cat]

As for your Serial mouse, I found this thread, I hope it helps:
enable serial mouse (COM1) - Ubuntu Forums

As for the audio, I might be able to help with that too.
Please show the output of

lspci | grep -i audio

aplay -l

And then alsamixer and tell me what it says for Card and Chip in the upper left.