> > > You can also see that I've disabled glx output and restricted screen > > resolution to 1024x768 or lower (non-widescreen resolutions) in the > > hope that this might help, but no luck so far.
I should've been clearer -- I made those changes through dpkg-reconfigure. (I've grown quite comfortable with the menu interface to Xorg.conf in the last 24 hours!) And, BTW, you're using etch, right? > Correct. lspci shows one VGA-compatible device, the line is: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0402 (rev a1) I should've looked harder at the Xorg.0.log I got when I ran with the VGA drivers; it told me directly that the VGA driver does not support 24-bit color depth, so it unloaded itself. I set this back down to 8-bit color, and just like that I can load up a minimal gnome desktop. Sadly it has decided the correct resolution is 320x200, which is not yet very useful -- I can't even see to reposition any of the control panels -- when I was hoping once I got a minimal setup I could use that as a base to finish configuring the nVidia-supplied drivers. But at least this is wonderful progress! Thank you! On that note -- You could also try if you can install the newest nvidia driver on Etch > with nvidia's own installer script: > > http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_173.14.09.html > > It might help if you get a newer kernel from www.backports.org first. > Also make sure that you purge (not just remove) the Debian nvidia > packages before you try this. > I had originally tried to run nvidia's installer, but it complained that it would have to recompile the kernel with its own hooks to load the nvidia driver. So I downloaded and gunzipped the kernel source package, but nVidia's script couldn't find version.h under the directory where source was installed, so I eventually gave up and tried what was supposed to be "the debian way". (Sorry, that's rather inexact -- I did this several days ago and it was before I started taking careful notes of exactly every command I was running.) I'll mess around with this a bit more and then report back. Best, Jeff
