fatal error: no screens found

[S_D_Willie]

time and time again i seem to run into this stupid problem.
running mandrake 8.1. i left it running last night (logged out of X, mind you) everything has been fine for the last week.

today i go to log back in and i get the wonderful error : fatal server error, no screens found."

it tells me screens found but none have a usable configuration. it was working fine. i had the newest nvidia driver up and going. then the next day. phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

any ideas why this happens and what the fix is? i checked my XF86Config-4 and i can see all looks ok i believe. this is very annoying.

SD

[pbharris]

SD!! How ya doing ? dumb question - i know youm must be horrible w/o X running. Well any chance you can post the errors? also waht has changed since the last X reset/restart ?

[S_D_Willie]

hey pablo. whats new? this was the error:
__________________________________________________ _________
Fatal server error
no screens found


XIO: fatal error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after
0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining

__________________________________________________ ________

i looked a little further up and noticed X had a problem when it tried to load the NVIDIA kernel module. i installed that again and that fixed the problem which is really cool but i dont know why it just stopped working though. last thing i did was install RTCW, i logged out of X, and left my pc on for a night. next day i logged back in and X wouldnt start. im glad i got it working but im just baffled at why it happened. ???
take it easy man.

SD

correction. im not horrible out of X, im just plain horrible. hehe

[S_D_Willie]

ok, at this point im gonna get grey hair. i booted up mandrake again a few hours later and guess what? same issue. a problem loading the nvidia kernel module so i had to do a make install yet again. what the hell? i wonder if this is a known issue with these drivers.

[Killer_Penguin]

ok, at this point im gonna get grey hair. i booted up mandrake again a few hours later and guess what? same issue. a problem loading the nvidia kernel module so i had to do a make install yet again. what the hell? i wonder if this is a known issue with these drivers.

Nothing that I now of... make sure that you have a script or something in /etc/modules.conf that will load the modules...

EG:

alias char-major-195 NVdriver <--- is in my modules.conf

[Schotty]

I have the newest nVIDIA driviers on three boxes here at my apartment -- GF1 - DDR, TNT1, and my roomie's GF1 256. The drivers are EXCELLENT and have not caused any problems on my part.

[S_D_Willie]

at the bottom of my modules.conf i have this line already there:

alias /dev/nvidia/* NVdriver

does this suffice?

[S_D_Willie]

after fishing around someone let me in on what i think KP_BOFH was trying to tell me. this was not my post so i cant take credit:

There's a problem that I found out about today with the newest nVidia drivers. They don't set up /etc/modules.conf correctly. It looks like they expect devfs (if you are running that, which Mandrake 8.1 did, and I assume 8.2 does the same) to put their device entries in their own directory under /dev. They expect user programs, also, to not open /dev/nvidiactl or /dev/nvidia0, but /dev/nvidia/<something>. Well, every piece of software I have opens /dev/nvidiactl, etc., including X, so I had to hack their changes to modules.conf to get it to autoload correctly.
Open /etc/modules.conf in an editor, and look for where the nVidia drivers added a line, it will look like this:


code:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

alias /dev/nvidia/* NVdriver

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have to either add another two lines (it doesn't matter where), or change that line to read like one of these and add the other:


code:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

alias /dev/nvidia[0-3] NVdriver
alias /dev/nvidiactl NVdriver

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leaving it in there the old way shouldn't harm anything.

Then, save and exit, and still as root, run depmod -a to re-figure-out your module dependencies. They won't have changed, but if you don't do this then modprobe will complain (harmlessly but still annoying) every time you try to insert a module.

Then, still as root, modprobe -r NVdriver, then exit to your normal user and startx. It should work better now, because it can autoload the module now.