Boot to black screen - was vlinstall.iso

[gamfa]

It's impossible to be everything to everybody.

[StrayBit]

I'm actually with newtor on this one.  Yes, we've had people who gave up without really trying.  Jim/irritated isn't one of them.

What he has experienced with VL I've seen with the major distros on some older equipment as well.  When someone sticks with us it does allow the devs to correct problems eventually.  OTOH, most people actually need to have their systems working within a reasonable period of time.

I appreciated seeing Newtor's and Caitlyn's posts as, apparently, I'm in the same boat as Irritated.

A few years ago, I purchased a variety of disks from a third party, some live.  I was less than impressed with Ubantu.  Was happy that Puppy or DSL allowed me to salvage some files from NTFS but was otherwise wondering how to use any of these systems.  And I wasn't going to break working Windows to install any of them.

Last Fall, with several of my Windows machines crashing and refusing to work after re-installation, and WinXP and later showing me nothing worth paying for, I finally tried VL4-Live. Appreciated that it was Slack-based (I had been playing with that off and on since about Slack 3) and liked it enough that I DL'd VL5.9.

I've spent the last six months trying to get it to work on two of my PC's with multiple re-installs of both 5.9 and 6.0 with the result that, after finding and installing applications that I thought would do what I wanted, I'd lose them before I could find out.  And, more than once, lost all my notes about learning to use Linux as well as what did and did not work.  (It is different even from DOS and CP/M which share a common heritage.)

One thing that kept me going all winter was this forum.  You all do an outstanding job, even with dummies like me.  (I didn't pick this screen name lightly!)  It does hurt, though, when I reply with the results from suggestions, that there is no response back.  Even a note saying "We can't help you any further on this." would at least let me know that I haven't fallen into the bit bucket. 

With Spring here, I will be able to devote less time to computing and will have to make do the systems as they are now.

[Irritated]

Well, like I said, the VL Forum is excellent, so far I can't even get post permission on DSL and LinuxForums isn't showing any signs of racing away.

Size is never a replacement for quality and smaller players (VL) can still make hits against the big boys. Look at some positives;

First, I got a VL CD to boot, many that I downloaded simply wouldn't.

Second VL did actually install. There were a couple I got onto the laptop just wouldn't go any further

Thirdly, VL would appear to run under command line, the problem was starting x

I have a particular project I need to get running pdq - from the laptop. I have a desktop running xp which does all my normal computing.

In terms of getting market share one has to accept that a few oddities may fall by the wayside - que sera. If, in the majority of cases, you can have someone whack in a cd and everything sings and dances and is beautifully Guified then you have a chance of breaking into windowsworld where your most frequently asked question is going to be 'what's a command line?'

I'm not denegrating VL or the community in any way. I simply have a slightly unusual objective, a zero budget and a little bit of bad luck.

There may also be some VL versions which work better on some kit than others There might might be a case for saying on the website - If you have this type of kit try this version first. I picked VL6 on the basis it was going to be all singing all dancing. Maybe this was not the wisest choice? If the devs have gained experience of this from forum issues they may wish to try targeting versions to satisfy all comers? Give people an easy start, get em on the forum and then crank em up as they go?

[Irritated]

Sorry, colour depth 16 doesn't work either

So what is the method of passing colour depth as a boot option

Like, I do, (from cd) linux /dev/hda2 ro fb (or fbdev, whish is best?) 1024x768 ....colourdepth

I'm picking fb (or fbdev) because that works on DSL and Vesa doesn't

And what else might crash the machine on startx? disable power saving ........

Do these boot options override what's in xorg.conf?

[nightflier]

The boot options described are for your text terminal, not X-windows. I would use just default VGA, that's the safest. Normally using no arguments gets you this, otherwise you can try "vga=normal".

It's hard to tell what to do with your machine. We don't know for sure that the installation completed successfully. You are definitely deep into geek territory, my compliments for sticking with it as long as you have.

[Irritated]

So maybe I need to see what DSL has set up for it's window manager configuration? That's probably not xorg. Any idea where I might find such a config file? 

[newt]

Could you post your xorg.conf contents of VL (and DSL, if possible)?  Also, can you provide the make/model of your monitor?  Last request would be the lspci listing of your VL system.  Perhaps your 'black screen' problem is more related to the Screen (i.e. monitor) section of your xorg configuration rather than your video chipset.  I've accidentally set 'out of range' values in the screen section before and ended up with a black screen, but since it was just an X problem I was able to kill X and get back to the terminal - your situation sounds *somewhat* similar. I'm thinking that the VESA driver with 256 (8-bit?) color depth at 800x600 resolution should be a safe place to start in xorg.conf

From a post on ubuntuforums I came across a user who used the following Screen (monitor) options to get their s3 virge/mx chipset working (of course this is going to be VERY monitor specific):

HorizSync "28-51"
VertRefresh "50-70"
DefaultDepth 24
Also, I did not allow the kernel framebuffer

Probably just a typo but I noticed that in your previous post you said:

I went into xorg.conf and found

Section "Device"
      Identifier "VESA Framebudder"
      Driver     "vesa"
      #VideoRam 4096
      #Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

Section "Screen"
       Identifier  "Screen 1"
       Device     "VESA Framebuffer"
       Monitor    "My Monitor
.......
       DefaultDepth 24
.......

In the above quote I see that the Device Identifier and Screen Device names do not match (framebudder vs framebuffer).  Likely, this was just a typo when posting but if it was a copy/paste then I would suspect that those names should match exactly.

I'm grasping here a bit. I'm not as technically advanced as many folks here but at least I bring a new perspective

[Irritated]

Hi, yes, the budder/buffer was a great typo I probably won't get back onto this until tomorrow afternoon at which time I'll see what I can dig out. I do also have the manual for the laptop to work from. Once I get to black screen the whole computer seems suspended, can't kill x or ctl alt del or anything, just switch off and start again. Quite intriguing eh?  The solution will usually be something much more simple than anyone expects