Hi all,
I just spent the whole day getting Backstreet Ruby working on my system,
mostly successfully. I'll report my experience then ask for help
regaining my virtual terminal #1 (or virtual console; I'm not clear on
the terminology. I mean the thing I used to get when I pressed
Ctrl-Alt-F1).
I'm running Debian Woody and my project is a digital picture frame
(read: "unwanted flat panel display gotten for cheap") near my
computer. The display is now in a nice wooden frame, hanging on the
wall, so it doesn't look like a computer screen, and it's attached to my
PC by a 15' VGA cable to a cheap PCI GeForce2. When I boot my computer
the picture frame display comes up with its own X server then one of my
digital photographs is chosen at random and displayed. It's totally
independent of gdm and whether I'm logged in or not (thank you,
Backstreet Ruby).
I followed the directions in the XFree Local Multi-User HOWTO, which was
very helpful. Thank you, Svetoslav Slavtchev.
I first tried using Andreas Schuldei's binary kernel package
(kernel-image-2.4.20-backstreet-ruby-p4_10.00.Custom_i386.deb) but when
I booted up my PS/2 keyboard didn't work. I then tried to patch a
Debian 2.4.21 kernel but the patch failed, so I downloaded a vanilla
2.4.21 kernel which patched successfully. When configuring the kernel I
tried to set "Input Devices/Keyboards/AT keyboard support" to Y so I
wouldn't have to deal with loading the module (as recommended by the
instructions). The kernel configurator wouldn't let me; it insisted on
it being set to 'M'. I tried booting this kernel and it failed in the
same way (no keyboard). I then reconfigured the kernel and turned on
"Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers". Once that was
on I was allowed to set "AT keyboard support" to 'Y' instead of 'M'.
Booting the patched kernel now works with my keyboard. I have to add
"dumbcon=1" to my kernel command line (maybe because I've got only one
keyboard plugged in).
I've got an AGP GeForce3 and a PCI GeForce2 in my system and I'm using
nVidia's binary drivers. I first tried the kernel-only solution but my
system crashed with bizarre patterns on my screens. Fine, so I switched
to Andreas Schuldei's binaries for the patched XFree86 3.0 and these
worked, but only if I probe my GeForce2 first, i.e.:
/usr/X11R6/bin/X -probeonly -layout Small
/usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -layout Small -prefbusid 2:7:0 vt8 &
after which I load gdm, which starts the other X server on the AGP
card. It seems odd that I have to probe the PCI card right before
starting the PCI card (this isn't about which card comes first), but
that's what worked.
I made some small changes to a program called "qiv" to behave itself
better when it displays the photograph (such as hiding the mouse
pointer). Yay, open source!
Here's the part where I need help. Now when I press Ctrl-Alt-F1, the
main display switches back to the text-only console BUT it's "greyed
out"! Both the foreground text and background look grey--the text is
darker than it should be and the background is lighter. I can read text
on it but I cannot type anything to it. This alarms me because I like
dropping out of X once and a while and getting a command line. Any
ideas?
During my experimenting I did try having gdm launch both X servers as
explained in the HOWTO. When I did this, instead of launching one
myself, I was able to use VT1 but suffered the garbage font problem.
Typing "consolechars -d" fixed it immediately. I don't care about this,
because I don't want gdm to launch both servers, but I'm noting it
because I didn't have the "greyed-out" VT1 problem in that setup.
A big thanks to those people who write the code and documentation which
makes this possible.
Sam
|
