No video on my PowerEdge server...
 

Ok, so I went to my university's surplus department and what did I find? A "PowerEdge 350" (Dell) server. Now, it had no hard drives (or ram, for that matter), so I plugged in the appropriate pieces from my spare desktop parts, placed my Gentoo install CD in the drive, and turned that puppy on. My problem is that despite having a VGA port, the server doesn't seem to be sending any video signals to my LCD. There is a little bit of activity on the CD drive and some lights flash for a little while, but I am not getting anything on the monitor.

I know nothing about servers, but I really don't know how to go about doing anything on this beast when I can't see anything. For all I know it is broken; or, maybe, there is something special one must do to get the video card to work on a server?

Any help would be appreciated.

Broken? Probably...
But I have many PowerEdge running Linux and most of the time, I must install some special drivers to make them work.

Take a look at the dell.com site and try to find video drivers for Linux...

However, I come back to my first guess....

You don't have a spare graphic card somewhere??

Good luck!

I shall grab a spare graphics card on my next stop to the surplus department.

Well, I was unable to get my hands on a spare graphics card, but I did take the graphics card from the server and put it into one of my desktops; the video card worked fine.
....* a little later *....

I figured it out (kinda). I figured that if the card worked, then the problem was between the riser card and... um... other stuff (wow, I am so good at this). So, I plugged a cable into the NIC that was in the other riser's slot, and when I turned it on the little lights on the card came on, so apparently the riser card was good. So I took out the NIC and put the graphics card in the other riser slot, and it worked. It is kind of annoying to only have one riser slot, but I imaging I can find/buy another one. Of course, there is the possibility of fixing this one. What typically fails on those things? I shall check for scrapes across the circuit board, but we shall see.

Edit: It turns out that it was just a bad PCI NIC that was messing everything up.

Edit 2: Oh, and thank you for your help.

Cool! That's so fun when the prob is so simple to resolve!!

Have a nice day! :)