For the past day or so, I have been working on a clean Gentoo installation on my Samsung NC10 netbook. Things were going along quite nicely with the rebuild using the testing (~arch) branch, including the initial installation of X. However, when I issued the lovely startx command, I was continuously getting:

(EE) intel(0): No kernel modesetting driver detected.
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Even though KMS was clearly set in my kernel, as evidenced by the output of:

# cat /usr/src/linux/.config | grep KMS
CONFIG_DRM_KMS_HELPER=y
CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS=y

After fighting for several hours with different kernel configurations, rebuilding all X packages (xorg-server, mesa, video & input drivers), downgrading the Intel video drivers and xorg-server in various combinations, and even running env-update (for some unknown reason, but hey, I was desperate ;)), I decided to ask for some help. Josh (nightmorph) recommended that I run:

eselect opengl set xorg-x11

a couple times. I couldn’t see what this would do, as I had set opengl already, and xorg-x11 was the only option. However, after running it a couple times, logging out and back in again, my X server finally started without error! Thank you Josh, and everyone else who made suggestions. I hope that this post helps someone else with the same issue.

|:| Zach |:|