I just installed R5F1. Before that I had R5D2.

After installing the machine is unable to start the front end. Instead,
I get a message saying

"Checking nVidia video driver installation.

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 mythtv tty1"

Then it keeps flashing the screen (about 8 times) trying to change the display
mode and get X running (I believe that is what it is trying to do), and it fails, saying

INIT: Id "c7" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes it tries again (8 flashes) then prints another line identical
to the previous INIT line. If I leave it alone, it just continues to do this every
5 minutes (flash 8 times then print one more error line).

Any suggestions on how I can fix this? It is puzzling because the frontend has run successfully (once) on TV out (immediately after configuration), but not when booted from scratch.

Further background: During installation I get an X display on VGA and use it to configure everything. Then when I run Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, it comes up with an X display on the TV (using TV out).

A minor convenience is that it attempts to redo the whole configuration process all over again. Anyhow. When I finish the configuration, I eventually get the frontend running. Then when I try to reboot, the frontend is unable to start, as described above.

There is no nVidia card in my machine. It is an AMD Sempron 3000+ on a MSI K8MM3 motherboard with 512M Ram. It has two tuner cards: a 350 and a 150. My previous setup for the R5D2 was an Athlon 900MHz gateway machine. That worked fine.

I am no expert, but have repeated the installation about 8 times in the last week as I changed card configurations and will tell you that I have experienced the problem you described on at least two occasions. The last time this happened I had put in a PVR-350 with a PVR-500. I had tried various combinations before that with a PRV-150 as well. In the end the configuration I have that is working now is the PVR350, with a PVR150.

After the PVR 350 installation is completed I was able to get video out, but after the first reboot, the system went into the error you describe. I was only able to get past it after reinstalling from the CD. After the install I have to add "options ivtv-fb osd_compat=1" to "/etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv" to address an issue with the 350, which will also work after the installation but then would give me black. Changing the ivtv option took care of that.

Not sure if that helps, but I would suggest a re-installation. In my case out of the 8 times I installed with combinations of the three cards I tried, I got twice the error you described.

Thanks for the reply. That particular problem seems to be fixed now, ... apparently it was happening because my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file contained
the entry "/dev/fb1" in the Device section, when it should have been "/dev/fb0".

/var/log/Xorg.log.0 contained:
(WW) ivtvdev: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0:9:0) found
(--) Chipset PVR-350 found
(EE) open /dev/fb1: No such file or directory

while lspci would say:
00:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC15 MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416)
MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. S3 Unichrome Pro VGA Adapter (rev 01)

That means that ivtv was trying to use /dev/fb1, but the PVR was actually on /dev/fb0. Once I edited the xorg.conf file, the problem was solved. A command I found on the web for finding out which framebuffer has the TV out is:

cat /proc/fb

The digit which starts the output line is what you want to append to "/dev/fb" in your xorg.conf file.

So that is solved. However I have other problems (I will start a new thread
with a more appropriate title).

It beats me though how the TV out worked once during the install, and then
on rebooting, it didn't work. Makes me wonder whether the xorg.conf file
changes after the first reboot, or maybe the version used during install is different from the version on disk ??? It is very weird.

Thanks again!