I had to reformat my harddrive, and am trying to reinstall Linux. I bought the SuSe Linux 8.1 Personal in a local store, so I have CD's and all. I get through all the installation process untill it is time to configure the monitor, resolution, and video card. A friend suggested it might be the video card driver, but I cannot alter what driver Linux is trying to install. When I click the 'Finalize' button and click on 'test' a screen of text appears, and the last line (or lines, depending on how many times I have tried to test the computer) is : ioctl FBIOPAN_DISPLAY: Invalid Argument

At this point, the screen goes black, and the monitor is turned to standby. I hit Control+Alt+Backspace and it kills the program, taking me back to the screen in which I can choose to finalize the settings. I have tried messing with the monitor selection stuff (my monitor is some old generic monitor that has the letters 'MGC' on it and what appears to be German writing on back), I have tried messing with the color and resolution, the 3D acceleration is turned off, etc. The Video card I have is the NVidia RIVA TNT, which I noticed on another thread the person was having problems with this same invalid argument display. But that person had the system up and running, so he could change certain settings a lot easier than I can. I am fairly new to Linux...heh. If I do not test the settings, and just click save, and continue on with my installation, when it goes to the graphical interface for the login, the screen shuts off as it did in the test. Remembering how things were set up before, I type in the required login/password and hit enter, and the computer starts whirling up, telling me it is something to do with the graphics card or the monitor. Any help is appricated!

-Andry

First of all, your thread title is a little confusing, in future posts it might be more helpful if the thread was titled "Blank screen on Suse 8.1 with Nvidia card" instead of a specific error.

Does your computer have a built in video card or do you have an older, more generic one lying around? If so, it might be easier for you to install Suse with that generic or built-in card and then once your system is running you can follow the instructions in the other thread you found.

Unfortunatly I don't have any spare video cards laying around. And the thought occured to use the one from this machine, but it is newer, the NVidia RIVA TNT is my old card. On my old machine. Just trying to get it up and running with Linux. Any suggestions or tricks are more than welcome.