DSL Video Card issue

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL Video Card issue
started by: Techie

Posted by Techie on July 12 2004,14:30

First off, DSL is an excellent mini-distro! I have used it at work on a couple of machines sucessfully, however, I cannot get it to boot properly on my home PC.

What happens at home is this: I pop the CD in, hit reboot, the PC starts to boot from the CD, gets to the point of the first DSL screen, where I just hit the enter key for the default boot process. Then its starts to decompress stuff, then the screen goes blank - and stays that way. It appears to continue booting at this point, based on drive activity, but the screen stays blank. On other machines where I have had sucessful bootups, the point where "tux" appears on the upper left corner of the screen is the same point where my screen goes blank on my home PC. I am guessing that I am having a video card compatability issue. My video card is a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX, with 16MB of RAM.

For what its worth, I have tried a total of 3 "mini-distros", and 2 of them won't work on my home PC. The 2 that don't work are DSL and "Feather" Linux, and the one that does work is "Puppy" Linux. By the way, DSL is my favorite, and that is why I am anxious to get it working properly at home.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Posted by ke4nt1 on July 12 2004,14:54

After the first DSL screen
Press the F2 key, then
try typing in the command
"dsl vga=normal "

Let us hear back from you if that works...
There is many other commands you can try,
but frequently this one solves many issues..

73
ke4nt

Posted by Techie on July 12 2004,22:23

Quote (ke4nt1 @ July 12 2004,10:54)

After the first DSL screen
Press the F2 key, then
try typing in the command
"dsl vga=normal "

The command "dsl vga=normal" worked!!!

I had looked that the screen that appears when you hit "F2" at boot, but didn't see that option. Where did you find it?

What is the default vga mode, if I set it to "normal" by using this command?

BTW, I am currently running DSL and am using it right now to surf the web!

Thanks again!

Posted by ke4nt1 on July 13 2004,00:35

I'm not sure of the details......Someone else here will know better than I.

"vga=normal" uses the standard "dos" type text mode for boot screen messages.
The usual boot option is more of an enhanced framebuffered 800x600 mode.

73 de Kent
ke4nt