Non-usable system

[cableties]

I have installed Debian 6.0.3 on a MacBook Pro (5,2).

Upon boot I have an unresponsive system. I get the following printout on the screen

[0.781858] i8042.c: No controller found.
Loading, please wait...
[1.028176] ssb: ERROR: PLL init unknown for device 4322
[1.028326] ssb: ERROR PMU resource config unknown for device 4322
INIT: version 2.88 booting
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher udevd.
Synthesizing the initial hotplud events...done.
Waiting for /dev to be fully populated.. [4.668190] b43-phy0 ERROR: FOUND
SUPPORTED PNY (analog 8, Type 4, Revision 4)
[5.342924] Error: Driver 'pcspkr' is already registered, aborting...
[7.284197] [drm[ nouvea 0000:02:00.0 PRAMIN flush timeout
_

http://www2.engr.arizona.edu/~weaverg/i ... -small.JPG

After which I cannot interact with the system. This print out is static.
How can I repair the system to make it functional?

[secipolla]

The last line (nouveau) is the kernel video driver for NVIDIA and it seems it's not working.
The pcspkr error is harmless and I don't know about those ssb errors.

Anyway, you could try disabling the nouveau driver at boot (hit e at the selected boot line in GRUB then add nouveau.modeset=0 to the end of the linux line and then hit F10 to boot).
If it works you won't have the graphical desktop but at least will have the console and I suppose you would have to either create an xorg.conf file for the vesa driver or install NVIDIA's proprietary driver. For the latter, the easiest way I know is with:

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cd /usr/local/bin && wget -O sgfxi smxi.org/sgfxi && chmod +x sgfxi && sgfxi

[cableties]

I tried the nouveau.modeset=0 trick and it booted up successfully: once.
After trying to start up again: I got the same errors as before.
The change I made to GRUB wasn't permanent so I had to write nouveau.modeset=0 again.
After rebooting again, all that was displayed on the screen was:

[5.079449] Not Responding

What should I do to fix this?

[makh]

It might help, try to find the debian specially retroftitted to setup a mac.

[secipolla]

For the GRUB issue, in case you boot successfully again, edit /etc/default/grub with:

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset nouveau.modeset=0"

Then run

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# update-grub

[wretched_dutchman]

Might be a bit late, but it might help some future visitors.
It's not necesarry to disable the nouveau driver entirely. You can just disable the 3d-acceleration via nouveau by adding nouveau.noaccel=1 instead of nouveau.modeset=0. This way you can still use X, but you'll get 3d acceleration over llvmpipe.

[cableties]

Thank you all for the replies, I installed Ubuntu onto my laptop. So I guess I kind of did install a version of Debian specially retrofitted to setup a mac.