[Solved]How to revert changes made by sgfxi?

[KenWeiLL]

How do I revert the changes made by sgfxi?

I have just downloaded and installed sgfxi on LMDE 64bit and ended with a blank screen and a blinking cursor.
Opening terminals doesn't work as well. Opening other terminals just display instantly the login prompt then disappear immediately replaced by a blank screen with just a blinking cursor.

Only recovery mode works but don't know what to do.

How do I remove sgfxi?
How do I undo the changes that sgfxi made?

[h2-1]

You're giving zero information, like what video card, what you did with sgfxi, or anything else.

If you installed a non free driver with the command: sgfxi
the easiest way to remove the driver is to install the appropriate xorg free driver with sgfxi,which always removes / purges all present non free drivers prior to doing anything else.

A true raw emergency method to get xorg running is: sgfxi -N vesa
then: mv /etc/Xorg/xorg.conf /etc/Xorg/xorg.conf-bu
then restart X, this will a: remove all installed drivers; b: let Xorg take over complete control and use whatever driver it feels like is right.

The exception is if the system was running Nouveau or radeon with kms, then you'd want to do: sgfxi -N nouveau
for example, which will remove the blacklisting of kms for noveau.

Usually a blinking cursor means that the driver failed to load when xorg started, or crashed, a common cause of this is simply having xorg looking in the wrong place for a screen, and finding none exiting with blinking cursor. Crashes of ati/fglrx driver tends to be ugly and hard to recover from. Unfortunately lmde was released with default runlevel 2 for x start, so that makes fixing things harder, I've already reported this issue to the devs and hopefully it will get fixed by the next release.

It can also mean a corrupted or incorrectly configured xorg.conf file. Depends on which card, which driver. Do yourself a favor and post a few more details and you'll find the help can help you, otherwise it's just guesses.

Also note if you did anything prior to running sgfxi, if you followed any online tutorials, if so, which ones, sgfxi tries to undo everything it finds, but sometimes there are methods that are simply bad that are used by some distros out there, that sgfxi simply cannot handle correctly.

I won't guess any further however.

[h2-1]

Also, define: you see the login prompt that vanishes, are you seeing the GUI/graphic prompt, or just the console one?

A frequent cause of desktops failing to start is / or /home being full. If you see the gui login, image based, and it vanishes, then your partition is full, and the driver is actually starting fine, it just can't build the desktop because there is no room in the file system.

If /home is full, the desktop cannot start.

To see if this is the problem, start into runlevel 1, single user mode, issue the command: df -h
and verify that / and /home have plenty of room.

If they do not, run: apt-get clean
to create some temp room, check again with df -h
then if it's still full, remove whatever you added to fill up the partition.

can't say without information.

inxi -pl
also shows partition information by the way.

[KenWeiLL]

Thanks.

Removing xorg.conf file and removing the nomodeset on grub reverted me back. I'm now back to GUI.
sgfxi is a no-go for me this time

[h2-1]

it would be useful if you posted some information, please. It is impossible to offer help to people who refuse to provide basic information, even when asked for it explicitly.

Your assumption that this is related to sgfxi is probably incorrect, it could be your card, could be the driver, could be lots of things, but since you insist on not allowing anyone to actually provide you help by not providing anyone with information, I won't bother with this thread any further. good luck.

[KenWeiLL]

it would be useful if you posted some information, please. It is impossible to offer help to people who refuse to provide basic information, even when asked for it explicitly.

Your assumption that this is related to sgfxi is probably incorrect, it could be your card, could be the driver, could be lots of things, but since you insist on not allowing anyone to actually provide you help by not providing anyone with information, I won't bother with this thread any further. good luck.

nvidia fx5500 video card.

actually i got it working now.
first, i download sgfxi.
second, i edit grub options adding nomodeset and reboot
third, i run sgfxi.

maybe sgfxi doesn't configure well when nouveau is loaded. so I disable it at boot before running sgfxi.

i'm sorry if i haven't provided any details before. but as with my experience, it always is not about the driver but it's about the configuration, particularly the monitor configuration. I have been distro hopping and same driver works on some distro and on some, don't.

[h2-1]

nomodeset should have been added automatically by sgfxi, which should then have prompted you to reboot to make it active. The exception is if it had already been added, or added incorrectly, then sgfxi would believe it was present and not required.

I've heard some faint reports of some nvidia installs failing on lmde but I have as of yet not gathered any information that might point to the cause.

So the legacy 3 driver itself is working, that's the 173.xx.xx driver, that's good.

[KenWeiLL]

It happened again. I wipe windows completely and reinstalled LMDE 64-bit.

I downloaded and installed sgfxi.
Run from TTY1.
Prompted for reboot, then ended up with a black screen... I tried to remove nomodeset from grub and still doesn't solved the problem.

When I booted with recovery mode, I deleted xorg.conf then reboot with nomodeset enabled in grub. This time, I've reached the GUI but still not 3D enabled. So, I opened up TTY1, run sgfxi, and that solved the problem.

3D enabled.

Hope this might help.

It seems like it doesn't work with running sgfxi first without nomodeset enabled from the start.
My conclusion is to not run sgfxi if it booted without nomodeset from grub. Otherwise, it would end up with just a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

[h2-1]

Very hard to say, sgfxi adds in several nomodeset methods, and if you used only one of them manually, you may find you don't have enough.

Also, sgfxi does not ONLY add one nomodeset, it also rebuilds initramfs, and updates xorg.conf, then says you need to reboot. If you manually add only a part of this process, sgfxi will assume the entire process is done, which would mean that it would not do anything, which would mean the incomplete manual changes would remain incomplete, which might mean a blank gui or blinking cursor on reboot. An LMDE developer will have to step in here and volunteer some debugging time I think to help resolve this issue, there's no easy way other than test, retest, and because this is a video driver, we can't use a virtual machine to do the testing.

Sometimes you should not reboot but halt, shutdown, wait, then restart, which is why sgfxi tells you to do this, this is because sometimes things are left life in ram, like initramfs, which can contain the nouveau driver, and a reboot doesn't clear the ram. Hard to say.

I'd have to receive full /var/log/sgfxi/sgfxi.log files for each step of the way to be able to see what's actually happening here, until that happens there's not a huge point in wondering.

Some cards may have issues, but I promise you, nouveau is a pain in the a$$ to deal with, and anytime I step into serious debugging work I have the pleasure of losing at least one day, often two, in the process, unpaid, unfun, and just generally a waste of one's finite life time.

I hear rumors that xorg 1.9 nouveau is actually usable now, by the way, but the way the kernel guys designed this stuff to lock in to the core system is not cute at all, and violates everything I have seen that is good about the linux kernel, in fact, it resembles exactly how windows kernels deal with drivers, you know, reboot.... reboot... pray... reboot....