Comment 7 for bug 277699

One afterthought after a day of Googling.

After booting in text mode, I edited xorg.conf, adding
  Driver "vesa"

startx got the X screen/mouse/kbd working, but of course there was no logged-on user.

I tried starting up calling
  /etc/init.d/gdm start
directly, but having the word "text" in /proc/bootcmd blocked it. Even tried altering the gdm script to delete that test, but still couldn't trick it into working.

There appear to be multiple grumbles about the intel driver in XOrg7.4 floating around the net.