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Topic: DSL Video Card issue

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Techie

Group: Members
Posts: 8
Joined: July 2004

Posted: 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!

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: 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

Techie

Group: Members
Posts: 8
Joined: July 2004

Posted: 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!

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: 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

3 replies since July 12 2004,14:30

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