Red Hat 7.3 - messed up frozen screen
 

I have just installed Red Hat 7.3 on my Celeron 500Mhz with a Radeon 7000 32MB PCI graphics card. I am also running Win98 on it, so I partitioned the hard drive (40GB ATA Western Digital), set up the dual boot, and I thought the installation went smoothly. But when I rebooted and loaded Linux, I got a quick textual Linux login screen, then my monitor turns off and quickly turns back on again (it's almost as if my monitor "reboots") and I see a very scrambled Linux desktop. At first I can see the bottom half of the screen but not the top half, and each time I have rebooted my computer the monitor does its strange reboot thing and the distortion has worsened. Not only is the screen all messed up, but I can't do anything, either. My mouse works, but other than that my system seems to be frozen. The only way to get out of it is to just manually turn off the computer.

Any suggestions? My monitor is a relatively new MAG 17", and the display looked fine when I performed the display test during install. I am completely new at LINUX, and I have no idea what to do now. I have searched for this problem in other threads but I can't seem to find anyone with a similar problem. Please Help!

just out of curiosity, but why did you post the same thread twice in the same forum?

I didn't mean to, it was I mistake.

ok, just that sometimes we have some people who post the same thread twice to get more answers

No, that's not that I was trying to do. After I hit the submit button I noticed that I spelled "frozen" wrong in the subject, so I quickly hit cancel, but I guess it was too late so after I fixed "frozen" and submitted the corrected one I had already submitted the first one. Sorry. I tried to delete the "frozed" one but I couldn't figure out how. You can delete it if you can.

ok, that's no big deal. Is you monitor also distorted in text mode?

I'm not sure, I haven't tried that. Is there a way to boot it in text mode even though I installed the GUI desktops? How do I do that?

let it run and when it is booted and your screen is funny looking hold down control-alt-f2 and see if that looks normal

No, it's completely frozen, nothing happens at all when I do that, or anything else for that matter. The only way to get out of it is to physically press the power button on my computer to shut it off. Incidentally, I just tried installing Mandrake 9.1 and it does almost the same thing, except with Mandrake the monitor just shuts off when it is loading "xinetd", and the computer freezes. Does that shed any light on the subject?

Mandrake is based off of redhat but usally has good hardware support. Have you tried knoppix just burn it like any other distro and it runs off of the cd so you could see if your screen is ok looking there. Also consider, unless you have any reason for 7.3, to install version 8.

Okay, I think I've isolated the problem, but I don't know how to fix it. I was able to get to the text login prompt by going into interactive setup and telling it not to start dm. dm was apparently the problem, because when I tell it not to start dm I actually get to the login screen without the monitor shutting off on me. Now, when I type startkde I get the following error message:

xmodmap: unable to open display "
xmodmap: unable to open display "
xset: unable to open display ""
startkde: starting up
ksplash: cannot connect to X server
kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set.
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
ksmserver: cannot connect to X server
startkde: shutting down...
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
Error: Can't contact kdeinit!
startkde: Running shutdown scripts...
startkde: Done.

Does that help at all? I also tried typing gdm and startx, and when I do the old problem reoccurs - the monitor shuts off and the computer freezes. This is very frustrating.

have you ran xf86config yet. If you are using mandrake you can get root power and run XFDrake to configuration your gui.

I did run XF86config, and I went through all the settings but it didn't seem to do anything. I configured the monitor settings to match mine, and I selected the ATI Radeon driver for my card, but everything is still the same.

I just tried to run XFDrake at the root prompt, but it says command not found. Is the root prompt what you mean when you say to get root power? I'm not really sure what that means.

Are you running Redhat or Mandrake. You can only run XFDrake in Mandrake. When I mean root powers is when you are logged in as your user and you type in su and it prompts you for your root password and you give it and you have root power. Sorry about that, it is XFdrake, the d isn't capitalized.