Hi, everyone,
I'm convinced that there's a simple fix for this... but I'm obviously overlooking it. Sorry to be so dense.

I've got an Acer Aspire 1350 notebook with an S3 KM400/KN400 video chipset. It runs Knoppix, Slackware and RH7.3 perfectly, but when I try to install RH9, I hit 'enter' to boot the kernel from CD, and two seconds after it begins loading the notebook's display is thrown out of sync. As far as I can see it's still in text mode, but it's quite unreadable. The RH7.3 CD works fine though. I don't have RH8 (never liked that one).

Apparently there's some kind of hardware probing that upsets the display hardware somehow. Booting with 'noprobe' and 'text' like options from the prompt doesn't fix it. I'm convinced that if I can avoid this particular point in the installation, everything will work fine. Other versions of Linux work like a breeze.
But how do I work around this? There must be a way, maybe even an easy one... but I seem to be missing the obvious here.

Suggestions anyone? All response much appreciated!

Regards.

Frank van Wensveen

Hi Frank,

I'm almost happy to see that I'm not the only one with that problem.
I haven't found a solution so far. Have you?
Otherwise, we're stuck with WinXP...

Regards,
David.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by dmilet
[B]Hi Frank,

I'm almost happy to see that I'm not the only one with that problem.
I haven't found a solution so far. Have you?
Otherwise, we're stuck with WinXP...

Hi, David,
By all means let's avoid XP! :-)
The crash turned out to be related to the framebuffer. After the install CD displays the boot prompt, you type 'linux nofb' and that will solve the problem. At least it did on my notebook; it let me run the entire installation procedure without problems.

Of course now I have other issues, such as the onboard sound card that doesn't work correctly (and, as far as I can find out, it never has worked correctly with the driver in RedHat Linux). You win some, you loose some. :-)
Apart from this minor annoyance, Linux now runs fine.

// Frank

Thanks for advice. Has anybody here installed the drivers from
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=296#km400
for RH or MDK with any success? Any gain in speed etc?

I've just tried to install the KM400 drivers.
But I cannot get it to work : the screen remains blank.
From the accompanying doc, I can see that the driver does not seem to support a resolution of 1024x768 @ 60Hz (the only mode that works on XP).
I still have to try with a good CRT monitor : the driver supports 1024x768 @ 85Hz, so does the CRT monitor.

I'll have to look at viaarena.com too.

Regards,
David

Boot linux with command line argument 'vga=792'
This fixes the screen sync on acer Aspire 1350.

thank u

linux nofb worked like a charm.....

cheers
kiranvj