I am using Mepis 6.0 on my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. It has an NVIDIA GeForce 2 Go with 32mb of memory on it. The video (DVD, avi, VCD/SVCD)plays fine on just the laptop, but here is my problem:

I am hooking the laptop up with a VGA cable to my 50" Samsung DLP. When trying to play videos through the external monitor, all I get is the blue screen with sound. I am not sure how to proceed to get the picture to the external monitor.

I have also tried using the composite video cable dongle that came with the laptop to connect through the composite inputs using NVTV and it displays the screen on the TV, but I still get the blue screen when trying to play videos.

I have used Kaffeine, Xine, Mplayer and they all have the same result: I get sound, but a blue screen in the video area.

If this is not the correct place or forum to be asking this question, please point me in the right direction.

Dell Inspiron 8000
PIII 1ghz, 512mb RAM
60gb HD
NVIDIA GeForce2 Go

Thanks for any help.

This may sound like a classic Windows-ism, but did you try to install the latest Nvidia Linux drivers on the laptop?

Have you tested it with some other monitors / or displays?

Did you ever have Windows on it? Did the external video output work when it had Windows on.

Stuff you can try re the above should be reasonably evident:

1. Test it with another external monitor, just to see if maybe the plug is nog broken or something (saw something similar with my dad's PC)

2. Load Windows on it and see if it works. If it does, your hardware is obviously OK.

3. Try and load the latest Nvidia Linux drivers on it and see if it helps.

4. May sound strange, but how LONG (in feet / meters) is the cable you are using? A friend of mine had this problem with a DVD player (sound, blue screen) to their TV. Turned out he needed some kind of signal booster between the DVD player and the TV to get it work... grabbing straws here, but as far as I can surmise the laptop might not put out enough juice on that external video cable to overcome resistance in the cable???

5. Try another cable?

Thanks for the help, I finally solved the problem. I was using the nvidia-legacy drivers and tried upgrading to the nvidia-glx even though I have an older video card. The driver worked but it still gave me the same problem with any media player (blue screen plus sound). I finally unloaded the nvidia-glx driver and loaded the official driver from the NVIDIA (the 8776) and this solved the problem. I can now watch video from the media players through my TV.

Even better, when I have my TV hooked up it automatically sets the display into widescreen mode instead of stretching the display.

To answer your questions though,

1) I haven't used it on another monitor.

2) I previously had Windows installed prior to Mepis and the monitor worked perfectly.

3) Answered previously

4) I am using a gold-plated 6 foot SVGA cable.

Thanks for the response, I had been working on this problem for about 2 weeks.