Either I'm high or graphics messed up
 

I have nVidia GeForce 6600 (GT I think) card and I think the distro didn't have a good driver for it. It works fine under Win XP.

I just finished install and when I boot up, it starts loading and then it tries to show the desktop, but all I see is colored bars everywhere; it kinda looks like when they're doing the screen test on a TV with all those colored bars, except the bars a way smaller and there's a lot more of them.

When I do Ctrl+Alt+F1, you can see it switching modes, but it looks like the same screen but in black and white. I first tried running in rescue mode and I could actually see what I was doing then.

So I got the nVidia driver from the website on a disk and mounted and then ran it...it brought up an install screen and it started to walk me through. Then it got to a point where it needed a kernel or something and so it wanted to know if it could go download it from the nVidia ftp, but that failed making the whole install fail.

So I rebooted and tried doing Ctrl+Alt+F1 again and this time just typing everything as if I could see what was going on in the console. And nothing happened. I did all the same steps to mount and then go to cd and run script but nothing happened or could be seen, just a bunch of black and white.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Thanks.

Get to a terminal and type...

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

Once this is done, type

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Work your way through (choose auto-detect video hardware and use the down arrow to change "nv" to "nvidia") and once it's finished log out from the terminal you're in.
Ctrl Alt F7 to get you back to X, then, Ctrl Alt Backspace to restart the xorg server.

Hope this helps.

Thank you. And yes Jesus does love me!

"Either I'm high or graphics messed up" ...

You didn't mention what you've been smoking.... (j/k ;) )