Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Muni Beduhin]

I have a Dell Inspiron with a damaged screen. It took a little massaging with the Xorg wizard, but I was able to get Puppy 3.01 working on it fine, with full 1024x768 resolution. I was impressed with Puppy and excited about the next release.

So I download 4.00 when it came out. However, no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to start X properly on this particular Dell. Now, granted, it does have a damaged screen, but this shouldn't have been a show-stopper. Knoppix 5.1.1 runs on it fine, as does Morphix 0.5. Fluxbuntu 7.10 RC1 had issues with X, but when I ripped the xorg.conf out of Morphix and, with modifications, used it in Fluxbuntu, Fluxbuntu started X just fine. I ripped the xorg.conf file out of my old Puppy 3 install and used it in Puppy 4--to no avail. I rebooted from the Puppy 3 CD to see if I could redo the process I had used to get X working. Yes, I succeeded--Puppy 3 works great. I booted Puppy 4 on a Toshiba Satellite I have, and it recognized the screen and ran at full 1024x768 resolution. So it's not that my Puppy 4 CD is corrupted or anything of that sort.

Regular Xorg doesn't work at all, and Xvesa will only work in reduced resolution.

So, several questions:
~~> Have there been changes to X in Puppy 4 that could be causing this problem?
~~> Is it possible to upgrade Puppy 3 to 4 by installing the nice new/updated packages (except for X!) and therefore bypass the need for a direct install of Puppy 4?

This problem seems very arcane to me so I wouldn't be surprised if no one knows what is going wrong. That's OK. I've been in Linux long enough not to get upset when things break.

[BarryK]

Repeat the process, your xorg.conf out of Puppy3., try X, kill X, then grab /var/log/Xorg.0.log. It's big, so gzip it and save it somewhere then post it here as an attachment. That's if x isn't working, otherwise you can do it from within X.

If you have a usb pen drive, at say sda1:

# gzip /var/log/Xorg.0.log
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
# cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log /mnt/sda1
# sync
# umount /mnt/sda1

[Muni Beduhin]

Well, interesting developments. My hard drive slowly died this afternoon as I installed Morphix. I never got to boot into Morphix because it kept getting corrupted every time I booted...
Then the hard drive started chirping like a bird, and wouldn't boot at. Wow! Very fascinating. I had heard CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK before, but never a bird's song. Anyhow, so much for my old Puppy 3 install.
So after removing the hard drive and forgetting (at least for the time being) about Morphix, I booted Puppy 3, set up Xorg and saved all for xorg.conf variations to my thumbdrive. (They inclued in the attachment.) I then booted Puppy. I forgot to pass pfix=nox, but no matter, it started Xvesa and I just killed it. Then I ran xorgwizard to set it up to use Xorg. Then I brought xorg config files--all four--and pasted them into /etc/X11. Ran X and saved the resulting log file to my thumbdrive. Zipped it up with the config files and here's the result.
Hopefully the computer will continue to run long enough that I can actually install Puppy 4....