Hello,
I am using fedora 9 on my laptop (Compaq Presario 2100 AMD Athlon if I remember correctly). Everything was fine then one fine day the display on the screen just stopped showing up. (Its possible that the cpu
overheated because I was working on it with the laptop on the bed and there
may have not been good air cooling.
Any idea what I should do to resolve this? Is it possible that the laptop has
gathered a lot of dust and dirt internally over the past 3 years and cleaning
it may solve the problem.

I was trying to connect to an external monitor...Initialy I can see some text
output on the external monitor but the moment it comes to login display it
tries to open the display on the laptop resulting in a blank screen.
By going into rescue mode I have access to all the important configuration
files...If someone can let me know in which gnome file I have to set the
display value it would be great...
I think I would have to set a line like
export DISPLAY=:0.1
in one of the config files. Any tips and info would be great.
Looking forward to a possible solution from anyone on the forum.

Regards.

The solution would be to fix your hardware.

A workaround would be to connect the external screen. Most laptops have a key to switch between the 'main' screen, and an external, usually FN key, etc. Hit that, and it may come up. If not, you can try to boot into rescue mode from a CD, and get your data off, let it boot normally, and log into it over the network from another machine.

Hello TBOne,

Thanks for your response and tip.

I tried hitting the Fn key and it works well for windows which is also
installed on the same machine. But it does not work for Fedora 9. I was
reading somewhere about setting the DISPLAY env variable in the gnome settings
but do not know which file to do it in. This would enable me to see the login
prompt on the external monitor and avoid going in for a costly hardware change
on my laptop.
Would appreciate a suggestion from anyone else also who has been through this before.

Regards

The reason the external monitor goes blank is because it is using the same settings and your display and it can not sync to the video signal. Here is one way to manually modify your xorg configuration file. If that works running xrandr might provide the specific info to run it at better resolutions.

http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teuben/lin...p-display.html