I guess this is my first post. I am getting tired of Windows, as I guess everyone here is/was. I bought a book at Barnes&Noble with the Fedora Core 3 install discs. I got everything working, like setting up the new partitions and doing the install without any hangs. But when the install finished and I had to reboot, the laptop came up and I guess everything finished booting, but I got a completely blank screen with no hard drive acitivity at all.

I hit the power button because that's all I could do to try to reboot. At least I know the GRUB is working. By the way, this is my first attemp ever at Linux. I have a Dell Inspiron 8600.

Any help would be great.

Look at this: http://www.bryan-gillen.pwp.blueyond...nux/i8600.html and this: http://carbteam.umbi.umd.edu/node/view/40.

Thanks. I read those two links and decided to intall again and choose a different monitor but that didn't work either. I know how to interupt GRUB and get to the grub command line. What do I do then?

you probably choose the wrong monitor during the install, choose the unprobed if in doubt.

I have sony vaio pcg-r505tl and have installed FC3. Everything was fine but after first boot I got a blank screen. So all I could do is power off and reboot to text mode. I loged in to the text mode and use startx to run X and notice that the screen is very small compared to the screen size. I tried to use gui utility 'display' fo fix the screen but it did not work and so I edited Xorg.conf. After a few 'try', I got the screen size and correct resolution and it looks fine. But the problem now is if I boot to runlevel 5, I see the login screen and if I try to login the system hangs and all I have to do is 'power off'. However, if I boot to runlevel 3 from grub, login and use startx, everying is fine.
Does any one have any idea?

on my inspiron 1100 a similar thing happened. after much research i found out that linux required the latest motherboard bios for the display to work properly. do this with caution though, as i nearly screwed up my laptop for good. in order to get to the latest bios, i had to go up halfway, then up to the latest. the halfway point rendered my power supply unrecognizable to the system. this was frightening due to the fact that in order to update the bios you must have the battery in and the power supply attached. upon further inspection i found that my friend with the exact same laptop had a power supply which had 3 prongs where as mine had only two. very retarded on dells part. anyway you may need to update the bios in order for it to work.

How to update BIOS? Though not sure why updating BIOS solves display problem, want to give it a try. If the display driver is not good enough, should I till expect to have better display by updating BIOS? Thanks.

well on mine, no matter what resolution i told fedora to use, i was stuck in the 640x480 mode. in order to update the bios (first check which one you have by looking towards the bottom at the boot screen)
go to the dell website where they have a file you can download and put on a disk. you load this cd and reboot your computer. the bios updater comes with instructions so its farily straight forward.

http://zervona.freefronthost.com/fea...nux/index.html

is a great website to check. he walks through installing FC1 and FC2 on an inspiron 1100.

Dear Folks:

I finally figured out how to fix the blank screen problem when logging out with FC2-the 32-bit version on my Dell Latitude C600 laptop. When I was doing a fresh reinstall of FC2-i386 I added the following boot parameters: acpi=off apm=on and guess what?!!! NO MORE BLANK SCREEN when logging out! I think this fixed the problem! This is a dual-boot system with Windoze XP SP1 Home edition. My son talked me into selling the laptop to him and I have to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windoze XP SP1 on the hard drive by itself. Oh well. I will buy another laptop but I sure am fond of it.

Sincerely,

JeanBrownHarrel