I have a new Dell Studio 1747 Laptop with i7 Q 720, 6GB RAM and an ATI Graphics card w/ 1GB RAM. I have tried Ubuntu (managed to load live with safe graphics selected) Fedora 12 / 64 never saw anything at all; booted to CD and nada. I know the DVD is OK as I used it on my PC. Suse I manged to install and as soon as install was finished, blank screen. The only distro that loaded flawlessly was Puppy Linux; which I used to edit Suse to runlevel 3 and still blank screen. Oh yes I also tried Suse in safe mode. I know Linux and ATI don't see eye to eye, but this is ridiculous. Oh yeah I forgot to add Mandriva: Managed to install, but then blank screen. BIOS is up to date.

Specifically, what model ATI GPU? Presumably the Fedora CD boots up and starts loading, but blanks at some point, correct? Do you know what video driver Puppy Linux was using? On the distributions you managed to install, are you able to remotely log into them from another machine after they boot up and the screen goes blank?

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650. Fedora doesn't load anything; there was a brief flash of something then total blank. I forget what Puppy was using. I'll check again later. Remote Log in? No. I reverted (replaced image) to Suse and am able to get into the Suse partition through Puppy and edit files.

While in SuSE, try and start up X. When it blanks, see if you can drop back to a console with ctrl+alt+f1. Copy the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file somewhere and then upload it here.

Adam

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Thanks Adam I'll give that a try later; busy with market now. Also Mandriva really screwed my MBR up (for some reason when I restored MBR it still loaded Mandriva) and I'm back to Windows 7 with no GRUB to load Suse so I'll have to see if Super Grub or something can get me in there.

Didn't work Adam. Actually I found another albeit beta Ubuntu that loads out of the box.
Thanks again, Allan