The Machine has a nVidia GeForce2 Ti. The card is conncted through a SVideo ↔ Scart Cable with the TV. There is no Monitor connected. On boot the card automatically switches to the TV for displaying the console output.

We're running Xorg from the current Debian Testing distribution with nVidia's lates propritary driver. For the GeForce2 it the “Legacy Driver” 7184.

# wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-7184/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7184-pkg1.run
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7184-pkg1.run

Put the nvidia module into /etc/modules then modify the xorg config.

The important parts of /etc/X11/xorg.conf look like the following.

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NoLogo"                "true"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
        HorizSync       30.0 - 80.0
        VertRefresh     50.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Generic Video Card"
        Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           8
                Modes           "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           16
                Modes           "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Unfortunately the TV screen stays black after starting the X-Server for a unknown reason. The trick is to reenable the TV-Output using the nvtv tool:

# apt-get install nvtv

Then use the following command to enable the TV output:

#> /usr/bin/nvtv -t -r 800,600 -s Small

I'm using mythtv as frontend and want to have it start autmatically after booting the server.

For automatic X starting and login just install gdm give the default user in the “Security” tab of the configuration screen. Or when this doesn't work for you (it didn't for me) put the following in your /etc/gdm/gdm.conf:

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=mythtv

Where mythtv is the user to automatically login.

All automatic startup stuff will go into this users's ~/.xsession

/usr/bin/nvtv -t -r 800,600 -s Small
mythfrontend