Sorry if this seems a rather basic question; I have a Dell tft screen and installed new drivers for the Asus ATI Radeon 9550 graphics card so that it could handle the 1920 x 1200 resolution with my Linux distros.

I connected the screen using the DVI connector and removed the vga cable which was connected via a KVM switch. But when I try to boot up I get nothing on the screen except the reply

no vga cable.

I can not even see the grub boot screen.

Do I need to make some changes so that the linux distros know to use the DVI output instead of the vga. I assume that the DVI gives a better picture but I could be wrong.

Thanks in advance for any guidance on this.

You shouldn't need to make a change when using DVI. Be aware however that some combinations of monitor+graphics card don't work at 640x480 (which is what the Grub boot screen is displayed at), so you may not see anything until X starts. I found this with my Apple monitor and Radeon 9200SE.

You are correct, DVI does give a better picture.

Thanks chhgee,

I did a bit of reasearch on the topic yesterday which confirms that I shoudl get a better picture. However, how can I get the grub menu if my card is unable to display it?

Infact the way my machine is setup I login via a CLI screen and then startx manually.

Is there a way around this?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a way round this - at least with my config - so I had to settle for changing the default entry in grub.conf and rebooting if I wanted to boot into a different OS. A pain, but I couldn't see another way of doing it. If you're without X though that presents a more serious problem. Sorry I can't be of more help