Hello there. I'm having a very tough time with Mandrake 9.1 on my Mac. I installed it (after some serious 'net searching...finally found someone else with the same problem), but now when I boot up into Linux, the screen is completely black. Perhaps it will help if I mention what my first problem was during installation...

I couldn't see the normal GUI installer, so I found a suggestion somewhere on a mailing list that said to type in <install-gui-benh text video=ofonly>. That worked to install, but how do I now "fix" my video problem so I can actually run Mandrake normally?

If I type in <linux video=ofonly> at the screen after choosing to boot Linux, I can get to -bash, but that's not really what I want to do yet. How do I get into the GUI login screen?

I've tried a number of things, including <video=radeon> and some other things that looked logical to a newbie.

Oh, my eMac has an ATI Radeon 7500, fwiw.

Thanks in advance,

Katherine

Welcome to LQ

First and foremost, I have no 'real' idea, but some suggestions.

Second, I'll be moving your post to a more appropriate Forum, which will be Linux - Hardware.

Go ahead and boot up into that "bash" screen, and login as your root user. During the install process you should have been prompted to set a password for this user, hopefully you can get all the way in to an actual bash prompt. At that time, try typing:
XFdrake

This should start the configuration for X (the graphical utility in Linux) and you can begin testing different options in there. To try the new options without rebooting, you type:
startx
This will attempt to start the X server and begin your 'gui' experience. Hoewver, it will kick you back to the "dark place" if the configuration is wrong. Don't get too frustrated if it doesn't work at first, just keep trying, and hopefully/eventually you'll get a configuration that works.



Cool

Okay, I tried startx and XFdrake, but couldn't get startx to work.

When I typed it in, I'd get 4 lines then
execve failed for/etc/x11/x (errno2)

or after a slight pause,

giving up
xinit:no such file or directory
unable to connect to x server
no such process

any opinions?
Katherine