hi everybody. can anyone help me with this?
i have a dell lattitude D400, and i am trying to use linux red hat 9, for the first time. after "sucessfully" installing it without losing my windows, all i see is a green colour screen. how can i fix this? i'd really appreceate some help, as i am totally novice in this, and am new in the linux world. thanks for considering it!

all the specs of my machine are:
1.6 P-M
512 ram
bios a07
graphics 64 Mb Intel 852
gigabit 570 eth.
true mobile wifi
Dbay external usb CD drive
60 GB Hdd

You should have a prompt on the screen similar to a DOS prompt.
This is where you run commands.
If you don't have a prompt then something is wrong. If you do, then you will first need to log in using the root name and password that you set up during install.
Type: login and press enter
Enter your root password at the prompt
Then type: startx and press enter.
You should now have a working window system. If you don't, or if you do but don't know where to find the help pages then post back.

hi mikieboy. nope, sad to say, i dont have any type of prompt. it goes through the boot process, i can see all the different things it does, the hardware it activates (all in text mode), etc...but then, instead of booting like it should and asking for a login, the whloe screen just goes green. there are no letters of any kind anywhere. it only responds to ctrl+alt+del, to which it restarts after a few seconds.
my small knowledge on this tell me it cant start my graphics card or it has a driver conflict (i know that happens in windows but i am not sure if such a thing is normal in linux as well). i have heard that there is a patch for the 855 Intel graphics card i use, but i cant figure out how to install it from the green screen...!

First of all, why are you installing such an old distro? OK, RH9 was the best RH ever released before FC, but still... :-) Anyways, I assume you have installed X and either GNOME, KDE or both, in which case you should be running an X server right after boot is completed (and no receive a DOS like prompt or anything resembling it).

If that's the case, try reinstalling it and configure X to use the VESA drivers. It won't be able to run hardware acceleration of any kind, supports up to 1024x768 (I'm not sure about 1280x1024) and will set you monitor to 60Hz - but since you are running on a laptop, most of those restrictions shouldn't be a problem at all.

What is true mobile wifi?

I have googled for an answer to your problem and have found a number of questions from people having similar trouble. Every thread I've seen does appear to have two things in common.
1) They are all Dell's of some model or another
2) They are all having the problem with Red hat

I suspect that the problem lies within the BIOS. You could try to update the BIOS or try a different distro, preferably using the text-based option for installation as this would give you more configuration options

well thanks for the help...yep, seems that the RH doesnt have the needed drivers, and its very incompatible with my hardware. i tried Fedora 3 and its works like a charm. Beautiful!
anyway, txs for the good advice, ppl.
have a great day.

-- Sam.

Sad you didn't do this half a year ago - FC4 is comming out soon. 6th of june will be public release date.