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!)

fb1024x768

How 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
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?