Debian – Linux kernel option to force video card to stay on

First, you need to assess what exactly you require your kernel to do. This means building a list of:

• Every piece of hardware in your system
• Hardware-related functions, like LVM and RAID
• Networking functions, like routing, VPNs, wireless support, etc.
• Filesystems, especially your root filesystem
• Other special kernel-level needs

Next, you should try to figure out how your current kernel is handling them, and then try translating that to a newer kernel. For this, you can look at:

• The outputs of lspci and dmesg - this will help you catalog hardware and what the current kernel does on boot
• What modules are loaded - look at lsmod
• The kernel configuration, if available - sometimes this exists at /proc/config.gz or in /boot

Once you know your hardware, and how the current kernel is dealing with it, you can roll a new kernel from the Debian sources. Focus on getting a kernel that boots first. Once you can get into a shell with your new kernel, you can take an incremental approach to the rest of your features. Recompile, adding features or drivers as necessary (perhaps as modules to speed up this process), then test each new kernel.

One last word about RAID. You should be careful about your current RAID setup, if it's software RAID - newer kernels and systems will use mdadm for managing that kind of thing, whereas older systems tend to use the raidtab approach. Your approach will change how you deal with RAID in-kernel, especially the autodetection bits. Take a look at the excellent Software RAID Howto for more info.

X11/Xorg are hard to deal with at the best of times.

Now there are a couple things you can do. One would be to familiarize yourself with the Xorg and write a new config by hand. It may not sound like much fun, but you'll be better able to handle such issues in the future.

Another option is to let dpkg re-create the default config for you. You can do this by running:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

If that doesn't work out the way you'd hoped and you have the nvidia proprietary drivers installed, you should be able to have them create a more better config that takes full advantage of your video card. The command for that is:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Now remember, in order to see any changes, you are going to have to restart Xorg. Depending on your distro and version, you can do this by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but you'll have a guaranteed restart of Xorg by logging out. If you're level of FUD is high enough, just restart.

Good luck and I hope this helps.

PS- I recently helped my brother with this same problem. Here are some sample configs should you decide to hand-write/edit your config: sample1 sample2