New videocard, no linux.

Astropicachu · 05-19-2003, 07:42 AM

Hi people,
As I am an absolute Newbie, I'm desperate for some kind soul to give some guidance.
I have mandrake 9.0 in dual boot with WinXP. When I did the installation all the hardware was recognized by the system and no problems.
Now I installed a new videocard. I had an NVIDIA GeForce2 and now I have a Powered by ATI Radeon 9000, 128MB.
Since then my Mandrake won't boot. I checked the installation CD and there are no linux drivers so I got them online, (I just hope are the right ones), now WHO COULD PLEASE HELP ME?
As I said, I am a novice to linux and I would really appreciate if you could explain all the steps.
Thanks a million.
Astropicachu

acid_kewpie · 05-19-2003, 07:55 AM

how do you mean it won't boot? if you just change the graphics card you should always get the standard boot up screen, starting the different services etc... if you do get that far, just press ctrl alt f2 to get a terminal log in, and then run Xdrake ( i think that's what is was called) to reconfigure the X server for the new card.

If for some reason you can't get anything whatsoever, it might be a framebuffer issue, but i'd doubt it an awful lot... buyt if you do, press esc when you get the lilo boot screen (or e if you're on grub) and boot to "linux vga=ask init 1" and try from there.

Astropicachu · 05-19-2003, 10:58 AM

Well, rather then going to KDE like it use to, I get a black screen like DOS prompt, saying "localhost" and I don't know what top do.
Please could someone help me...
Thanks a million.
Astropicachu

slightcrazed · 05-19-2003, 11:47 AM

My best guess is that you still have the drivers for the GeForce installed, and because you are now using a different card X will not load and you will be at a shell prompt instead of getting the graphical log on. The best thing to do to start with is to re-run whatever Xconfig utility comes with Mandrake (I use RedHat, and the utility is called xf86config, do some research on Mandrake's site and you'll find it). When you run that utility, it will ask you what type of vid card you have, and you can specify the radeon card. This will tell X to use the correct paramaters for your new card, and from there it should let you startx, and all should work. After that, you will have to load the Radeon drivers for your vid card so that you can get hardware acceleration. Do some Google searches for how to load Radeon drivers on Mandrake.

Thats all I got for ya.

slight

carlywarly · 05-19-2003, 11:50 AM

The text you need to type to start the program in Mandrake is "XFdrake" without the quotes - make sure you type it exactly like that, or it won't find the command.

fancypiper · 05-19-2003, 12:06 PM

Linux is working fine, you just now have a CLUE. Welcome to the Command Line User's Environment.

Download and install the drivers for your new video card as I don't think that card is supported by the kernel other than svga.

# Configuring X
Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO - video cards
The Linux XFree86 HOWTO
Common X configuring tools:
Mandrake - XFdrake
Redhat 7.3 down - the setup utility leads to several config tools
Redhat 7.3 up - redhat-config-xfree86
Debian - dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
You may have these tools:
XF86Setup
XFree86 -configure
Xconfigurator
xf86cfg
xf86config
xconf

# Mandrake links
Mandrake home page
Mandrake Users website
Easy software management: Red Carpet
Maximum RPM
rpmfind
You didn't install the developmental packages? As root, command:
urpmi gcc