X server/Vid Card ?

I have this old box, HP Pavillion 8240, 233Mhz 256 Meg RAM.

Well anyway, I tried installing Mandrake 8.2 on it. The install goes well, everything sets up as it should, nice picture, axion monitor. When I re-boot the booting process rolls on by and the screen just goes black and the monitors indicator lights go to orange. So I install RH. Im just playing so it doesn’t matter to me. Same thing. It was a 98 mach when I got it and had no video problems.

???



I also tried both KDE and Gnome with drake and it always goes past the login.

What version of X?

I've had the same thing happen when invoking X on my FreeBSD machines. I found that by updating to XFree86 4.2.0 I was able to get around a problem very much like this. It seems that one of my video cards only took advantage of the generic drivers X had to offer. I had misconfigured it and bypassed the generic drivers altogether. Bam, when X starts invoking the window managers, nothing doing. The monitor goes to stand by mode with the little orange light. I would suspect something similar in your scenario.



Regards and good luck.

Was any form of the installation interrupted or tampered with in any wrong form? I've experienced this problem in the past, and would love to help but I'm a wee bit confused on exactly what happened.

Tedob1

I have never come across this problem myself, but would be happy to ask some friends who are somewhat Linux freaks (Mandrake) :) ...... if they have ever seen this behaviour and possible solution.

What make of video card do you have in the machine ?

a similar problem and possible fix .... may help

http://www.mandrakeexpert.com/showarchive.php?arc=27634

Phat_Penguin its really not worth going out of your way for, like i said im just playing and thank you for your offer. However that link of your looks promising and ill try that tomorrow (well later today now) the graphical login is selected and id like to loose it

Spyder32 nope no interuptions after the initial install it worked great, a little slow being a 233, but i was on line for a few hours with it, made a post or 2 here, shut it off and that's the last ive seen of penguines.

chefer its interesting you mentioned freeBSD, because i also tried that, in fact before the others. the x-config failed compleatly and i tryed it with all three options. after a few tries i just shut it down and dugout linux. I didn't think to mention this because i just shrugged it off to my inexperience with bsd. Maybe freeBSD was the only one the was actualy sucessful in finding a problem?

maybe i should try another vid card and run xfdrake as suggested in phat_penguin's link. ill let you all know how it turns out FYI.

Quote:

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...because i also tried that, in fact before the others. the x-config failed compleatly and i tryed it with all three options. after a few tries i just shut it down and dugout linux. I didn't think to mention this because i just shrugged it off to my inexperience with bsd. Maybe freeBSD was the only one the was actualy sucessful in finding a problem?

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Fact of the matter is that the default install of X when running through the general install of FreeBSD is not very thorough. Then you have to go through and reconfigure /usr/X11R6/lib/XF86Config to perfection before X will work from that installation. In many ways, it easier to not install X immediately in FreeBSD and don't use the ports for it either. You're better off getting a copy of it on download and running it that way. Put a copy of it to CD for safe keeping if you're satisfied with the way it works.


Any how, take a look at this thread. I believe that everything you really need to know is contained within this site for getting your card to work, provided it is on the list of supported display boards of course.

If your board is on that list, get the latest verision of XFree86, which is 4.2.1 these days, and try the steps in that thread. The information I had posted is more specific to FreeBSD. As far as I can tell, it pretty much the same given exception to the location of the config file. However, Problem Child and a few others provided more specifics on the placement of the config file for Linux distros.

Regards, and good luck.