I cannot get Linux to boot up. I have had two apparently successful installations but the system hangs during bootup.
This morning I tried the Suse 10 Live Distro.

the last few lines before it hangs are:


Total Swap = 0kB
Free swap: 0kB
65520 pages of RAM
0 pages of HIGHMEM
1499 reserved pages
489 pages shared
0 pages swap cached
0 pages dirty
o pages writeback
15 pages mapped
4632 pages slab
2 pages pagetables

The System is
MSI K8M NEO-V K8M800,
AMD Sempron 3100+ 1.8GHz Socket 754,256KB;
Crucial PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB KIT w/two
matched 512 Mb DDR-DIMM`s 2.5V, 64Megx64
160 Gb PATA HDD:
Windows XP Home

Thanks

Al

Hi,
Thanks for your system specs, that helps a lot.

Would you by chance have the S3 Graphics UniChrome Pro IGP on board graphics that you are using?

The VIA K8M800 chip set runs the on board video. I didn't see any other video card that you had. I believe this would be your problem, but I'm unsure because I have never used Suse.

I had a similar problem with Kanotix which is a live CD. When the xserver tried to start I got weird video results. With Kanotix it saw that it was a VIA on board graphics but loaded the wrong driver. My fix was to use one of the boot options with Kanotix which lets you use framebuffer 1024x768. This uses the vesa driver which is not as nice, but does give you a working graphical environment.

If your computer just stopped booting when the xserver tried to start up that would be my guess. You could see if the LiveCD of Suse has boot options at the beginning that would allow you to use framebuffer or vesa driver.

I hope that helps. If you are able to download and try other distros you could try Kanotix and use the fix that I gave. Or I seem to remember that the latest version of Knoppix booted without any problem too. Knoppix and Kanotix are known for their great hardware detection. It might be worth a try.

Let us know if you suceed in getting it going.

mowestusa

mowestusa,
Brilliant - thats the problem. I found a copy of Knoppix 4.0 on a Magazine cover disk and tried that and it boots up straight away no problem. During startup it lists the Video as Unknown.
I was trying to run Fedora Core 4 as a fully installed system, dual booting through Grub, but it is obviously suffering the same problem.
I will have to find a full distro that is more hardware forgiving as I would like to install a full system at some point. Either that or put my old graphics card back in.

Thanks very much for your help

Al

You probably would be better off with the old graphics card. The VIA on board is taking memory away from your system memory, where a card would use its on board memory instead of stealing your system ram.

You should be able to install any system you would like, but would just have to make a change to your xorg.conf file after the install, or perhaps it would allow you to make that change during the install. Every linux distro should allow you to use the vesa drivers which I believe is what Knoppix is using to boot up properly.

You could always do a hard drive install of Knoppix which would give you a Debian system. I would lobby for Kanotix. Do the trick I told you about when loading the live CD. Kanotix has a new graphical installer that works great. I have it dual booting with Windows XP without issue.

I have read recently about a possible driver that will work. I might have to try that on my system and let you know how it works.

mowestusa

I have fitted the old graphics card and FC4 now boots up. Ironically Kanotix wouldn't boot, nor will Suse 10 live but I may have a dodgy disk so I will try another iso. I like Knoppix and may try the hard drive installation if I have time. Next project is to get my USB WLAN adaptor working.

Al