I'm really new to Linux (Just installed mandrake yesterday) and I've come accross a major problem: My SiS900 card won't work. Now of course I searched Google and I found my answer at a site I can't post yet and it said to download them in Linux but I can't so I downloaded them in Windows and booted into Linux and installed them there. After that when it was booting I noticed that instead of showing the progress bar and saying press esc to see verbose it just went to a black screen with the whtie text so I knew something was up. Then eth0 still failed and then after that when it was supposed to go to the login it just went to the black screen and does nothing.

Can someone please help me? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Darrell.

Modules for the sis900 chip are included in the kernel source. From linux run 'modprobe sis900' and if there are no errors then you are good to go. Otherwise you may have to recompile the kernel with support for sis900 either built in or as a module. You will find the driver under 'network devices -> 10/100 Mbit ethernet devices' I am actually paraphrasing that, but you should be able to find it.

Does the card work under windows? You may just have a borked card...

Works in Windows. But I can't go do any of that stuff now because after I installed the kernel files Linux boots to a black screen..

Sorry, my bad. I ignored the more pressing problem.

So when you get this black screen, can you tell if the computer is frozen? Or is it just a display problem? The first thing I would do is try a [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[FN] key combination where 'N' is a number between 2 and 6 and see if you can get a login prompt.

Which bootloader do you use? You may be able to boot linux in single-user mode for troubleshooting this...

Well I just changed over to Knoppix and I like Knoppix alot! But I just gotta get my sound card set up hopefully this won't be too much of an issue. Thanks for all the help anyway!

Hello Darrell4sho,

Maybe you can give us a bit more information about your mainboard (or system) that you are using.

With kind regards,

Richard