I have just taken my old AMD 950 out of storage, so I have no idear if this was a problem before, or if it's just developed.

When I start up, I see the pre X windows commands (staring up the network, checking the hard disks, ect) pyrimids in the background. When I would expect X and KDE to start, the screen goes completly blank, and the power light flashes like when windows is asleep ("standby", windows seems asleep or grogy all the time to me). I don't get a "no vidieo signal" message from my monitor like I did when windows wasn't driving the video card properly, and I can hear the harddrive running eventualy stopping when I would expect it to when asking for logon. I'm wondering if Mepis is displaying a higher resolution than the monitor can handle(why can't it dispaly a message for that I wonder?).

I have mepis dual booting with win98, no problems with that(well.... nothing out of the ordanary anyway) and when I boot to Knoppix using a live CD I don't have this problem either. After tring my Mepis live CD, it does work, but only if you select "Failsafe" from the grub menu. I think that the core of the problem is that Mepis can't drive my Video card without using the VESA drivers.
Is it posible to add this driver to any of the GRUB menu options after installation to the hard drive?

you could always boot into Mepis normally, then hit [b]CTRL+ALT+F2{/b] when the screen goes blank, to drop to a virtual terminal window and login at a text prompt.

then edit your X configuration to adjust the max res. and monitor refresh rates, or grub menu options..

Actualy, last night I was trying that. I can log in, and have a text prompt (with pyimids in the background and everything). I tryed changing my resolution to 640x480 but it didn't help, not that obviously. I also added some GRUB options similar to the ones for "failsafe" on the CDROM. These produced an interesting and colourfull range of errors ranging from "file not found" to "kernal panic". The closest I got to working was adding the options "vga=normal" and "xdriver=vesa" to the kernal boot options in GRUB, these produce no errors, and the screen flashes white before "sleeping".
From the textprompt, it is posible to restart X, but all it sucseeds in doing is making the screen blank.

I know this is not only posible, but quite easy as I have seen somone else doing it (years ago though) with an iderntical motherboard and MEPIS version inside 5 minutes.

Incidently, I have a Trident Cyberblade i1, I don't think I mentioned that in my first post.

I'm thinking that it's a smilar problem to this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=300054
does anyone here know the driver name for the Trident Cyberblade?

I'v finaly worked it out! in the X configuration file in /etc/X11/ (can't remember name of file off the top of my head, sorry) when I changed my device from "Trident" to "vesa" and rebooted, X started working (no mouse though). I was able to bask in the phosphorus glow of victory for fully 20 minutes before my hard drive died. It is now very, very dead.

I have taken this a sign from the techgod that this box was not meant to have a Debian like OS on it, and after replacing the (rather old) 5 gig HDD with a newer 20 gig I have decided to run a dual boot of win XP and red hat using the win NT boot loader. Any thoughts?