Laptops :: Black screen on Dell XPS
I just got the laptop today, and it has windows xp pre-installed, so i wanted to see how well it would work with linux, so i tried my old DSL cd, and i made it to the boot prompt, hit enter when it said "boot:" and then it loaded for a second, and screen is now black.
3.4 Ghz intel processor
ATI Radeon Mobility (unsure of exact name)
1 gig ram
80 gig HDD
The only ATI drivers installed are the ones that came pre-installed..
With Dell XP computers, be sure and enter "vga=normal" at the boot: prompt.
I have one with a 17 inch ultrasharp monitor, P4 HT, 1 GB ram, etc.
and found this to be necessary.
One nice thing about the 1 gig of ram, you can also do it like this:
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boot: knoppix vga=normal restore toram
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I have my dial up settings, email, etc. on a flloppy, and the entire /knoppix
folder on the CD is copied to the memory. Then you can use XMMS to play
music CD's, and the computer runs very quiet, with the big hard drive not
being used at all. Also, it's very fast, as nothing has to be paged out of the Damn
Small CDROM, it's already in RAM.
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Have to use an external hardware modem connected to a serial port
to use dial up,however, as the winmodem supplied by DELL won't get
detected. I do use wvdial in my remaster, on top of Damn Small 6.2.
All 6x and 7x Damnsmalls do not use wvdial, so a lot of modems get
undetected by these DSL versions. Version 5.3 will work, however, with
wvdial included in that. Also, you can download and use Luit Linux, it's
very nice, and has wvdial.
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Also, don't try to copy your /knoppix folder to the hard drive, and try and
use a boot floppy. The DELL motherboard uses an odd hard drive setup,
and so /dev/hda1 is not found by the floppy. You can copy /knoppix to the
hard drive, but the floppy cannot locate it. Just run off the CD, and use the
"toram" option, and you are good to go.
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At the time of writing this, everything seems to be working just fine...
Its copying knoppix to ram, and now is starting its normal configuration...
and damn it was fast!
thanx for the help!!
now if i can just remember how to get X to run, it didnt automatically start..:(
hm..apparently it didnt connect my internet connection either 
X is started with "startx".
You may have to go get a hardware modem to replace the winmodem in the DELL,
and then see if DSL can detect it. If not, see if you can add wvdial to your restore floppy. I have some stuff on that here:
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http://www.angelfire.com/ms/telegram/general_howto
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original here.