I just recently managed to install Red Hat 9 on my computer. I had a ton of trouble installing it because it didn't want to recognize my firewire card. Finally, however, I got it.

Now I have another problem though. When it is booting up, the boot freezes at, "Initializing new hardware (or searching for new hardware; I can't remember offhand)" I already have edited the boot config files by adding, "nofirewire." I don't know if that is the problem though.

I can boot up into the prompt by adding "single" to the bootloader config. From there, however, I can't do much else. I haven't configured my ethernet card (I don't know how to do it through the prompt), so I can't access lynx, epic, pine, etc. I tried to log into X by typing "startx," but I get a ton of error messages and it doesn't boot.

Any ideas what the problem is, or how to fix it?

What brand of laptop are you using?
One thing that might help is to go into the BIOS setup and disable legacy USB support. That is notorious for causing installation/boot problems. You might also check to see if APM or ACPI are enabled. The APM power management is not often found on newer laptops. ACPI is only partially supported in linux. Just to be safe, you might want to also disable ACPI to see if that helps.
Good luck,
Zane

It's a Prostar laptop. I have tried disabling stuff in the bios, but to no avail. I've tried booting up with EVERYTHING disabled; it still didn't work. Oh well; maybe I'll try again...

You might try booting a Knoppix or a SuSE Live Evaluation CD and see if either one of those distros will run. Knoppix is usually very up to date on kernel issues, and SuSE has included the ACPI patch in the default kernel in 8.2.
I am using SuSE 8.2 on a Compaq, and the only problem I have is getting a Netgear wireless ethernet up and running, but I am close to getting it working.

Zane

Which model of Prostar do you have. I have the 8894 model and had not much time getting it to run well. Things I had to do is install Redhat using the nofirewire noprobe options. after install I booted with a bootable cd of linux and edited the /etc/modules.conf file and remove references to usb and firewire. I was able to boot up the Redhat 9 installition and X run fine (Radeon 9000m). On shutdown it hung of pcmcia. Have not had much time to do anymore on it. I know I will have to compile a new pcmcia modules. USB might be a little more trickier. I think firewire driver is a little behind with the newer chipsets.

If you have good luck let me know.

I had good luck installing Redat 7.3 on this notebook also. If I remeber usb seemed to work fine on this version. Never had much time with this setup either. Someday I will have sometime to try again.

Hope this helps you out thespear33.
Brian