Recently I bought a new Dell Studio 14 laptop and am having hell lot of problems configuring linux on it. I suppose my graphics card is not being supported by the OS.

Problem: The screen goes blank (as in gets switched off, nothing revives it except a physical restart) during the installation process or the first boot.

Distros tried:-

openSUSE 11.2, archlinux :- goes blank during installation. (the last line i remember seeing is about the udev package being loaded.

Mandriva 2010 :- Installation completes successfully but upon booting from the HDD for the first time things get nasty and its after I provide my username and password that the screen goes blank.

DreamLinux:- this one gave a rather helpful error message saying "Cannot start X.. fatal error.... no screen found " !!!!! and hence couldn't boot into the live session.

My laptop contains a 2.26 ghz core 2 duo processor, 4 gigs of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. The graphics card is a 512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 4530

Most importantly I found Ubuntu and Xubuntu running fine on it... so am presently coping up with it, although personally I prefer openSUSE/Mandriva.

Please help me to sort this thing out.

It'll be hard to figure out what's going on without log file. However, the open source drivers have supported 2D acceleration on that card for a little while now. In Mandriva, are you providing your username and password at the console, or does X actually start up and display a login manager? Can you grab the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file that is generated under DreamLinux and attach it to a post here?

Adam

If you are using Ubuntu, there should be an icon in your menu (mine is under "System") that says "Hardware Drivers". If you run that, put in you root password, you should be offered the ATI proprietary drivers. Use those and follow whatever directions the give you.

Use these links if you want to try openSUSE or Mandriva.

HTH

Forrest

I have dell laptop with same Graphics controller. Fedora-12 works out of the box.

hey all thanks for your suggestions.

I had to just add three phrases onto the grub bootline

acpi=off nolapic noapic

just doing this brought my computer to usable state. but i dont know what that does ... can anybody please enlighten me?

* ACPI is part of power management of ur PC/laptops(generally laptops), for efficiently consume power.
* ACPI divided into two : local APIC & I/O APIC.

hey bro, if any case, interested to sell ur laptop dell studio 14?


manish

thanks manish but why in heaven would I want to sell my laptop .. its not even 2 weeks since the day it was delivered.

actually I tried whole lot of things but I am not able to get sound from my system while using linux, can anybody help me please.