Hi there everyone, i hope someone can help in some way.

About 2 weeks ago I downloaded and burned the 4 ISO images of Fedora Core 4 from redhat.com and performed a fresh install on my IBM ThinkPad G40 laptop {Intel P4 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD}.

Everything went well, when i logged on for the first time everything seemed cool, tried using a few apps, they worked, appart from Eclipse (some posts sugest its coz it requires JDK 1.5, anyway) which freezes and has to restart the machine.

As the machine reboots in the first GUI boot proces where the hostname is being established the screen goes blank and about 1 minute later the screen flickers again and then it all goes blank. The system fails to bootup, no erros are shown, nothing is visible, just a blank screen.

I formated the partitions again and performed a fresh install, but the same problem happened, i was only able to boot successfully once in the system. I was not able to bootup again from that on, the same simptoms as before appeared.


Has anyone come across similar problems or knows what is cousing it and perhaps how to treat it?

p.s. i have had Fedora Core 1, 2, 3 and Suse 9.1, Sun JDS 1, 2 and Solaris 10 on it and they have all worked perfectly so i dont think its a HCL problem.



Thanks in advanced :-)

Dear AlLinuxUK:

I am not sure what happend with your situation, but I think you can try some CD Base Linux, (like KNOPPIX) to make sure is it caused by hardware problem or not.

If the KNOPPIX runs well, then it should not be hardware problem.

I wounder it may cause by ACPI.

Did you try Crt-Alt-F1 key. when screen goes blank.

By the way, Is Solar can install on PC?

I will try to read some information about Eclipse.

Best Regards

Eddy Lo

When having boot problems, it is useful for diagnostic purposes to try booting into runlevel 3 and, if you get through the login prompt, to start X manually. This gives you a better chance to see where the failure is occurring.

You can select runlevel 3 at boot time by editing the grub options or more permanently by editing /etc/inittab and changing from runlevel 5 (init 5) to runlevel 3 (init 3).

To go the grub options route, power up the system and “press any key” when the grub selection process starts. (The commands to do what is described next will be displayed on the screen.) Now edit the highlighted line in the grub menu, select the line that starts “kernel /vmlinuz...” and edit it. At the end of the line, replace “rhgb quiet” with “init 3". It should now look something like this:

kernel /vmlinzu-2.6... root=LABEL=/ init 3

Actually, you can leave the “rhgb quiet”, but you will get more information if you remove it. Save the edited line and boot.

If you get to the login prompt, log in as root and attempt to start X from the command prompt by using:

startx

Let us know where it gets hung and someone may be able to suggest a fix.

(FYI: To exit from runlevel 3, either “reboot” or “halt”.)

Dear AlLinuxUK:
I just search the web, it is true, some people using eclipse with FC4 will crash the system!
The problem maybe caused by when one use "root" to exec eclipse.

Very strange

I read from
http://www.linuxfans.org/
but it is Chinese language.

Best Regards

eddy Lo

Hello WhatsHisName & eddy__luo, thanks for replying.


eddy__luo, i will avoid using root (whihc really should only be used to administer the box) as a normal user.

WhatsHisName, i will try what you sugested, and will post any outcomes here.



Thank you guys,


:-)