Video issues on Live CD's of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10
 

Hello to all,

I've decided to try Linux again, now with a newer, beefier computer. I'm having an issue, however, with the two distros stated in the subject, both Live CD's. Whenever I boot them up, I am getting various colored lines on my screen, with a few grey-ish boxes, and that is the extent of what I see. However, if I boot Ubuntu in safe graphics mode, it displays just fine.

I am running an Alienware Aurora m9700 (laptop) with two Nvidia 7900 GS cards, each with 256 MB of memory. My processor is an AMD Turion 64 mobile 2.4 ghz with 512KB L2 cache.

I figure it is, of course, a video problem. Oh, and those two cards ARE SLI-compatible. Just for the heck of it, I turned off SLI in Windows from the Nvidia control panel and tried Fedora 10 again. It had the same result, and I noticed a few errors on boot but they went away too fast for me to write them down.

Any ideas?

How many live-cds have you tried?

What about burning a copy of Knoppix 5.1.1 and using it with its cheatcodes. This might give you more information about what works and what doesn't, if you can get Knoppix to install. A failsafe installation is probably making the same changes as with the cheatcodes, but not with you in control.

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

You could open a terminal and use the command <dmesg> with options to obtain information on what is going on during the Ubuntu or any other installation you can get to display.

http://www.linfo.org/dmesg.html

You have googled with all the combinations of specifics you can think of, I presume.

Another alternative

You could burn a linux DVD and install it as a double boot. A DVD installation procedure might have more options to choose and a better chance of success than a live-cd. openSUSE 11.1 is just released and might be a good choice. If you don't want linux after you have installed and tried it, you can just remove it and expand your Windows partition again.

I imagine that if you can install something with basic graphics, you could then work your way to the full use of both graphic cards and the nvidia driver.

I don't think any of the Live CD's are going to support SLI or vendor (nVidia / ATI) drivers on boot.
you will need to install and configure the proper video drivers after you install Linux on the machine.

nVidia SLI support has been available in Linux since December of 2005.. so it shouldn't be much of an issue 3 years later..

My Dell laptop with integrated nVidia Graphics controller displays vertical lines every quarter inch opr so the whole way across the screen after a default install.. Once I install the nvidia drivers the lines go away and everything works just fine.

Actually, what I'm talking about is not the fact that there are some icons displayed and some random green/red/whatever colored lines, but rather the fact that there is absolutely nothing displayed other than some random colored lines and a couple gray boxes, which I'm not sure what those are. Nonetheless, good responses everyone.

Yes, I have searched Google for display issues, but I don't get any issues that sound like mine. Not sure what the exact name of the problem that I am having is, but I haven't seen any pages that describe it. Blank screens and problems with legacy Nvidia support under Ubuntu 8.10 have been talked about though, just not my problem.

I will go ahead and partition my drive seeing as how I have plenty of space and see how it works out on a full install. Seems to me as if it is simply a driver issue anyways. I will get back to you on the results.

Wow.

I just realized something big that is definitely going to make this tough, if not impossible.

I have two Nvidia Stripe 100GB HDDs on a RAID 0 array, which from what I can see in Windows Device Manager, it says it is on an Nvidia nForce RAID class controller. From what I've been reading, it seems like it isn't a very good idea to try and dual boot on a RAID array, so does that mean I'm going to have to do a clean install of the OS if I want to give it a try? Other than use an external HDD, which financially seems out of the question at the moment.

Gotta love computers >_<

Also, I've been able to boot the Live CD's of Fedora and Ubuntu from an external DVD-RW drive, but when I put in the Fedora 10 DVD it won't boot it for some reason. The one in my laptop is seriously junk and I can't really trust it. Nice of Alienware to give me a crappy DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

Read this articla about your RAID controller and Linux.
http://reformedmusings.wordpress.com...d-nvidia-raid/


IT appears that you CAN install onto that array if you like. Here is the most comprehensive how-to I have seen.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

Quality

You might change the brand of DVD and CD disk you're using. Some drives are very sensitive to the standards of the medium, and known quality producers are recommended. In this case more expensive is usually better. Google will tell you what works.

You have burned your downloads at low speed and checked them for quality by doing a md5sum?

Excellent comments guys. Nice pages posted on the RAID configuration and I will attempt to put that to good use this weekend.

On the subject of my media, I am using Sony DVD+RW discs, and just off of my intuition I would say that Sony is pretty reliable in many cases, this being one of them. My drive is an external DVD burner which already is burning at a pretty low speed. It is a Plextor PX-716UF, and it hasn't failed me in the past. Though now it seems to be making weird noises which I am not too sure about the cause of.

As far as checking my downloads, with the Fedora 10 DVD I downloaded a torrent file of it from Fedora's site on which they state that the checking is already done when downloaded through Bittorrent. If that is true, then I am in no need of summing it. I did run a read test on the disc through Nero 7 Essentials to determine if there were any errors on the disc. On my external (the Plextor) it told me that there were no errors, but using the same disc on my internal drive, it told me that all of the beginning of the disc was bad, so I just stopped checking it. Whenever I burn a CD from that drive, however, it seems that there are ample more problems than when I burn from my external, so that should be proof enough that the internal drive can't be trusted to check a disc, let alone install an OS from it.

I found an article that stated that if I burn the boot file onto a CD and boot it from my internal drive that it will allow me to use the media on the external to install. Don't know if that is true, but it is worth a shot.

Alright, I'm back after a little bit of time. Since I last posted, I've been doing a lot of school work so I haven't been able to test if I can get Linux to work dual-boot with Windows XP on FRAID. However, I HAVE been doing some looking around to see if there are any performance differences between software RAID versus fake RAID. So far, I have come up with a lot of opinions but no actual numbers. I'm still looking but if anyone knows anything/knows about a site that might have some real answers, I would be very thankful. I suppose what I am really thinking is that after reading through the forums about setting up the aforementioned Linux on a dual-boot with FRAID and realizing how much of a task it becomes (as well as the fact being that the kernal can can never be fully compatible with FRAID in the first place and attepting an install could result in complete data loss which would mean a complete waste of time), I figured that if the performance gains are minimal/losses are too great, I would forgo the idea of dual-booting on FRAID and just turn off the FRAID, proceeding by just installing the OSes on their own separate disk. Once again, your help is much appreciated.

Personally I would use true Hardware RAID or Software RAID.. fakeRAID doesn't have much to make it appealing imho.

I have not found any indication that fakeRAID provides any sort of performance boost, but definitely a higher level of complexity to get working.. I'm still looking for the same info you mentioned.. if fakeraid truly outperformed software RAID I would think there would be specs and benchmarks all over the place.

Right, hardware RAID would be much preferable, but my system is a laptop, so that isn't much of an option for me. Software RAID would work, but my whole thought on trying to find the performance info is to know what the verdict is on which is truly better, and by how much. Really, both are putting the burden on the processor, so I would guess that the gains are not truly significant performance wise, but then again that is why I am looking, because I don't know. All I have found as far as charts go are hardware RAID-related.

So yeah, any person who actually knows which is really better (I assume software is better than FRAID) and knows whether the gains are worth the time and effort sacrificed to get it going would be greatly helpful. Thanks for all of the help!