I am trying out some distro;s, Debian based ones seem be fine. Its the RPM ones that are giving me hell of a time.

Hardware: Laptop HP compaq nw8240 ATI FireGL v5000 Centrino Mobile 15.4" display

FC5 BLAG-50K and VLOS 1.3Alpha (all using xorg v7) do not allow me to go beyond the monitor probing stage and anaconda does not come on; rather I get the BLACK SCREEN with nothing showing. So, I have tried every boot option under the sky to bypass the display detection stage so that I can at least come to GUI installation

Boot options:
1. linux xdrv=vesa res=1024x768 splash=no noapic nolapic noprobe acpi=off ( in various combinations)

But it seems I am doomed not to run any of these distro's.
Can anyone tell me how to bypass monitor detection, and at least allow me to configure moitor as generic vesa at 1024x768 res, and then I could install the flippin' ATI driver later?

Here is a distro that just works out of the box Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.X, and it also uses xorg v7!! Why is it that this distro understands the user so well? Have you seen their wiki..flawless. Just follow the steps and you are set.

VLOS looks like the same and so does BLAG, but hell I cant get then to install?

Thanks for helping me out (as you can see I am a bit fed up)

Smiley

if you can boot up to a black screen, try hitting Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get back to a terminal. From there you can issue xorgconfig and get xorg set up.

Hopefully this will help/

when I do that ctrl at f1 the black screen open text "starting graphical installation" and white cursor blinking at the bottom. ctrl alt backspace does nothing but ctrl alt f2 brings a shell prompt (sh-#) but does not recognize xorgconfig

Now what?
I am in VLOS 1.3 alpha installation

Try to start it with the complete path: /usr/X11R6/bin/xorgconfig and you have to be root to do this (it seems you were root, I added this just to be sure ).

tito
the problem is this: when the black screen appears, and I do the ctrl alt f1, the screen chnages to to text mode and HANGS at this point
==
"starting graphical installation"
==
and white cursor blinking at the bottom.

if only it could give me a command prompt like # or $ where I could type the xorgconfig; any thoughts why this is happening like this?

Just out of curiosity, has anyone else been through this or is it just me?
And here is another useless piece of information: I tried another debian based linus (ELIVE), and it installed glitchlessly (installing the ati fglrx with a beautiful gui and workde just like that). Now these guys now what the users need.

Anyway back to my problem...

All the distros you have listed (BLAG, FC and VLOS) seem to have one thing in common, they all use Anaconda for installation. It could be that Anaconda is having problems with your graphics hardware. There is an option to do a text based installation "linux text" when you boot up. Try to install in text mode and then use xorgconfig (or system-config-display for FC) to configure the graphics card once the installation has completed and you have logged in to the system.

That is true, reddazz. This may just be the the break I was looking for. I will give this a try. and report back.

UPDATE: Sorry BLAG (FC5 derivative) does not work with system-config-display. At the #system-config-display, the screen goes black and the hdd is quiet, no screenflicker either. VLOS 1.3a4 does not have text mode as yet.

Reddaz, could you recommend me a RPM based distro other than the ones I have listed and not PCLOS or mandriva. For some reason PCLOS causes my system to shutdown midway duirng an install. Strange but it is reproducable. I have check disc integrity and MD5SUMS is all ok.

I have tried installing Foresight but their help documentation is very poor, so does not look like a long term distro for.

How about the new CentOS 4.3. Do they have good support forums and documentation? May be I should give that a try?

thanks

Have you tried Suse? CentOS is essentially a rebuild of Redhat Enterprise Linux so if you are having problems with Anaconda, I doubt CentOS will work fine on your hardware.

SUSE GNOME is buggy on my DVD installation (Novell SUSE 10.0 Eval)- the panel keeps exiting abruptly...crashes. But I will give it a try again. What version of xorg does CentOS come with, if itis <v7 I should be fine. But thanks anyways.

Bummer, I really want to test rpm distro's

CentOS ships with xorg 6.8.2.