Knoppix Bitdefender Rescue CD - No Xserver

[tinman404]

Linux newbie needs help.

I have a 2003 vintage Gateway with the notorious 82545G integrated graphics. (Lucid hangs regularly.)

For the last week I have been trying to get the Bitdefender Rescue CD (based on Knoppix) to give me a GUI with no luck. I tried as many of the cheatcodes as I thought might help. (By the way, are the cheatcodes intended to replace or append to the other boot parameters?) What I get is a flash of the screen followed by a blank screen. Ctrl Alt Backspace and Alt F3 lands me at a bash prompt. I can mc to xorg.conf, which I have edited, saved, and tried to restart xserver with no luck. I have tried copying portions of xorg.conf from ubuntu 7.10 - that didn't work. The command dpkg-reconfigure doesn't work. Restarting xserver fails.

Results of lspci -v are as follows:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 01)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Memory at f8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
Capabilities: [e4] Vendor Specific Information

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
Memory at ffa80000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 1

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
I/O ports at e800 [size=32]

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
I/O ports at e880 [size=32]

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
I/O ports at ec00 [size=32]

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
Memory at ffa7fc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [58] Debug port

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=32
I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff
Memory behind bridge: ff800000-ff8fffff
Prefetchable memory behind bridge: e6a00000-e6afffff

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP])
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
I/O ports at <unassigned>
I/O ports at <unassigned>
I/O ports at <unassigned>
I/O ports at <unassigned>
I/O ports at ffa0 [size=16]
Memory at 20000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 20
I/O ports at e000 [size=32]

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 20
I/O ports at e400 [size=256]
I/O ports at e080 [size=64]
Memory at ffa7f800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
Memory at ffa7f400 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

01:02.0 Modem: Broadcom Corporation BCM4212 v.90 56k modem (prog-if 00 [Generic])
Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device 0002
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
Memory at ff8ff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
I/O ports at dc00 [size=16]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

01:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller (rev 81)
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 4000
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 21
Memory at ff8fe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
I/O ports at d880 [size=64]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

After massive frustration and confusion, I'm tapping out. Can somebody throw me a bone here? I don't need the GUI to be pretty, just functional at, let's say, 1024x768. How do I get this GUI to run? Luchadores, ayúdeme por favor!

Thanks for any help someone can offer.

[krishna.murphy]

Did you try these cheatcodes (suitably modified to fit the rescue distro)? (note: NO knoppix at the beginning!)
fb1024x768How about this one? (it's lower-res, but should work, I think.)
knoppix xmodule=svga
One or both of those could possibly do it. Another possibility - ctrl-alt-F5 is how one accesses the GUI in older versions (the ctrl-alt-Fx stuff seems to be absent in version 6, but might be useful in your case.)

Cheers!
Krishna :mrgreen:
p.s. Perhaps if you tell what you mean to accomplish we could be more helpful; mostly we work to get Knoppix 6.x going these days...
p.p.s The cheatcodes tend to override some behaviors, mostly, but some of the effects are additive, FWIW & IMHO.

[tinman404]

Krishna, thank you kindly for your recommendations.

My old windoze box recently had a major infestation of malware, and even though I think we eradicated it, I wanted another way to check. Thus, the interest in the BitDefender rescue cd.

I tried the fb1024x768 and to my surprise got a screen that looked like 640x480 with an application window larger than the screen and an error message suggesting I use the text mode to scan. I could never get the fb1024x768 to give me xwindows after that one partial success. I tried your other recommendation, but it didn't work. I finally tried the text mode which ran the scan, up until the point I got a "out of memory: killed process 4545 (bdscan)" message. When I stopped the scan before the error message in a later attempt, I noted that the app generated a log file with one line of text for each file scanned. With something like 350,000 (ish) files, that's a big log file in small ramdisk, and I figure that's what made it run out of memory. But now I am entering an area which is a subject for a BitDefender forum, not Knoppix.

So, still no xserver, but I would be content to try runing Knoppix with different parameters (it's hard to read the preset parameters on this distro, because of black text on a grey and black patterned background) and maybe figure out how to either suppress the bdscan log file or get it to do some sort of exception-only reporting.

Thanks again for your efforts.

[krishna.murphy]

Krishna, thank you kindly for your recommendations.

My old windoze box recently had a major infestation of malware, and even though I think we eradicated it, I wanted another way to check. Thus, the interest in the BitDefender rescue cd.

I tried the fb1024x768 and to my surprise got a screen that looked like 640x480 with an application window larger than the screen and an error message suggesting I use the text mode to scan. I could never get the fb1024x768 to give me xwindows after that one partial success. I tried your other recommendation, but it didn't work. I finally tried the text mode which ran the scan, up until the point I got a "out of memory: killed process 4545 (bdscan)" message. When I stopped the scan before the error message in a later attempt, I noted that the app generated a log file with one line of text for each file scanned. With something like 350,000 (ish) files, that's a big log file in small ramdisk, and I figure that's what made it run out of memory. But now I am entering an area which is a subject for a BitDefender forum, not Knoppix.

So, still no xserver, but I would be content to try runing Knoppix with different parameters (it's hard to read the preset parameters on this distro, because of black text on a grey and black patterned background) and maybe figure out how to either suppress the bdscan log file or get it to do some sort of exception-only reporting.

Thanks again for your efforts.

You are welcome! Have you considered using Knoppix itself, which has ClamAV, an open-source virus scanner (http://www.clamav.net/)?