Screen not displaying from Live CD

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Screen not displaying from Live CD
started by: tadpoleaus

Posted by tadpoleaus on April 01 2007,23:03

G,day

I am having problem getting DSL installed on my son's old PC, I have tried using Xubuntu, but this takes about 3+ hours to install and is slower than (enter analogy here), and takes about 5+ mins to boot.

DSL seems to run up from the CD (dsl-3.2-syslinux), but as soon as it tries to run X, (I think that is what is happening) it just shows a black screen. I don't think it hangs, I think it is a video/screen issue. Prior to this I was running Windows 98 with no problems.

I was able to install it into the hard disk, and some how get it running to a command line, not sure how.

I can get it up and running from CD with failsafe, but only when I pick the lowest possible screen size and attributes, really the screen looks so 1960's and it is not functional.

I was able to get the live CD to work on my PC, 3.0 mhz, and looks goods and works fine, so CD not broken.

Any direction will be good, have tried most alternate settings (F2 & F3) stuff, but any direction from youall is appreciated

My background is IBM mainframes (don't judge me too harshly), so I understand the Linux concepts, but the implementation is slowly getting up to speed, so write answers slowly.

Hardware:
Compaq Presario 2276 (circa 1998)
333MHz AMD K6-2
4.3gb hard disk
256 Mem

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on April 02 2007,02:43

Some forum search results:
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=12457 >
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=5440 >

If nothing in them works, please state which video system you are using.

Posted by tadpoleaus on April 02 2007,04:24

Thanks for those,

no real help though...., still no screen to display

There was an error when I tried to load Xunbuntu, as follows:

SIS630 comp. bus not detected, module not inserted.
Looked for SIS5595 but found unsupported device 5597
SIS5595 not detected, module not inserted.

Hmm, the onboad diplay is SIS 5597 (4 mb) I am getting an uneasy feeling about this, I think That Linux may hate my motherboard.

Any thoughs......

Posted by tadpoleaus on April 02 2007,04:51

Hi,

With further investigation I found this:

< http://www.linux-sxs.org/multimedia/sis559798.html >

It states that the SIS5597 is a dog....well for Linux anyhow, I will post here what I did to over come the problem(s), but any other details on how to over come this are quite welcome.

Posted by Juanito on April 02 2007,05:12

One thing you could try is to boot from the Knoppix 3.4 CD, in some cases there are modules on this CD that are not present on the DSL CD.

If you're lucky, the answer may be as easy as copying a missing module for your display.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on April 02 2007,13:36

I'm assuming you haven't loaded any XFree86 extension.... afaik the sis module is already there (mydsl contains 4.3)

From the site you posted:

Quote

Note that all of the above instructions are only for 3.3.x versions of XFree86. With XFree version 4.0.1 (i.e. Caldera LTP) the SiS drivers seem to work better and the only thing required was to add the line Option "NoAccel" to the "device" section. Actually you just uncomment it. But the performance is still very poor.

Posted by curaga on April 02 2007,16:06

You could try my extension ddcprobe from the testing section
(sorry for advertising :cool:

, but it seems just right for this)

It probes all the video modes your hardware can use