I have two video cards in my computer (on board and an ATI Radeon) Is there a way to change which monitor the command line (ctrl- alt- F1) is output on?

I guess you could, if you'd managed to get some line(s) in your .bashrc file with the BusID of your card on the PCI bus somehow. Never tried it, so can't help you more specific I'm afraid...

sounds complicated.

If you already have both displays working with X, then why no just setup an ETerm to display on the second monitor? But I guess it depends on what are you trying to achieve.

I have one monitor, I use the Radeon for X, but my computer won't boot if I set it to use that card by default (I don't know why, its just how it is) It's not really worth the effort of trying to solve the problem it sounds like, but sometimes its nice to have a problem to fix...

OK, I'm confused.

Are you saying that you plug your monitor into your ATI card and that works fine with X?

So the problem is that you do not see anything on the screen while the system is booting?

Do you see the grub boot menu?

Do you see the system POST screen at boot time?

When you set the system to use the PCI-E or AGP as the default device do you see the boot process and X?

I configured the xorg.conf to go to the ATI card. That works swell.

Until X starts, I see nothing. No grub, no boot, no nothing.

In the BIOS if I set it to boot off of PCI (Yes, PCI, my computer is old as balls) It will come up on that card, but it freezes on the HP loading screen. I've looked for solutions, haven't found one yet.

Anything else? Its pretty screwy, I know.

So it's a hardware problem. You've got two choices, update the BIOS, or try a different video card.

If I were you I would check the M/B version and revision and look on the HP website for firmware updates. They may not have any - I'm not sure if HP publish them.

You could look on the M/B manufacturers website for firmware, but be very careful with the revision and whatnot - If you find one that looks like it matches maybe fire them an email to see if it's OK to apply to an HP box.. HP deal in vendor customised hardware, and flashing BIOS can result in an unusable system (though usually the flash program will spit the dummy if there is a problem and not screw you - usually).

If the update comes from HP though, you should be sweet.