I installed Mandrake 10.1 on my laptop, a HP Pavilion Zt1130. The install went (supposedly) fine, and grub works, etc. The only problem is that KDE won't load, it boots right up to the command line. I tried typing in the command startx, and it gave me the error below.

XIO fatal IO error 104

I have read a bunch of threads of people using different distros, and NVidia video cards who had this error, but my laptop does not have an NVidia video card, it has a S3 Savage (8MB).

This video card worked fine on Fedora Core 1, so I should assume that it'll work on Mandrake 10.1.

Could someone give me instructions on how to solve this error?

thank you

Ben

Unfortunately 10.1 CE uses Xorg while 10.0 uses XFree86.

XFree has been used in prior distros for quite a while so installing prior versions of Mandrake on your laptop gives fairly good results.

10.1 CE is a not quite ready for prime time version, as such autodetection may not work properly and there are numerous video related issues (just see the posts from the Nvidia and ATI users on this board!).

You may have better luck with 10.0 on your laptop see:

http://www.tenacious.us/projects/laptop/mandrake_10.php

Given the slew of problems here I may wait until 10.2 before attempting to install anything past 10.0 Official on my laptops.

I'm currently running 10.0 w/o any problems on two HP laptops. All function keys, multimedia keys, and devices are fully supported (but may require some tweaking to get fully functional, from you) EXCEPT for hibernation and sleep modes, which is really more of a kernel issue.

Is there a way I can uninstall Xorg, and install XFree86?

No, the 10.1 distro has too many Xorg dependancies.

You'd end up breaking everything.

oh well....

Is there a polite way to uninstall Mandrake 10.1?

Just install 10.0 and format the existing partitions during the install.

I don't have 10.0 on me right now 'cause I'm on dialup. I have no easy access to get the cds off the internet.


edit

I wonder if x.org is going to plan any updates fixing this problem. does anybody know about that?

alright, cancel everything.

I reinstalled mandrake and chose the generic savage video driver, and everything works as far as kde is concerned.

now the only problem I have to figure out is how to get mandrake to recognize my pcmcia slots so I can go on the internet in linux.

Great!

Now PCMCIA devices are NORMALLY automatically identified and installed.

If PCMCIA does not appear then this is because one of the dependant lower level kernel drivers was not installed, usually either because of kernel parameters or arguements passed or conflicts.

On one of my laptops PCMCIA support did not work until I ENABLED acpi which had been turned off by default in the Mandrake install.

Once enabled Linux also recognized anything plugged into the slot(s).

Hello,
I got exactly the same problem in Mandrake 10.0 after I upgraded to the latest kernel. After boot I end up at the prompt. Usually the startx command gets KDE up and going. However, after trying go get the TV-out to work, I get the same error message as you do. And also, starting the old kernel doesn't solve the problem. Right now I see no other way than reinstalling the system and I would prefer not to of course. So if anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate that.

/Magnus