So I figured I'd give this linux hoohah a shot, and heard good things about Mandriva, so decided to dual boot with WinXP. I installed it just fine, went to start up, and on what I believe shouldve been the login screen, I get a vomit of colors in a corrupt screen. I popped the CD back in to check to see if I clicked something wrong when choosing my graphics card. It was already selected on Geforce 4 (generic). I have a FX5500, so I switched it to Geforce FX (generic) and gave it a test. Failure, same problem. When the screen goes corrupt, everything locks up but my mouse. I can move it around fine, but the keyboard doesnt respond. Cant Ctrl+alt+del, cant even toggle the num/cap/scroll lock. Im more or less an idiot when it comes to linux, I know barely enough to log in as root and how to open a terminal. Any help at all would be appreciated.

Based on your description of the graphical problems, I'd have thought it would be due to a problem with the configuration of your X server. However, if you can't even toggle the num/cap/scroll lock, it seems like you have more serious problems. Does pressing ctl+alt+F1 do anything?

Keep in mind that it is theoretically possible that there was a corruption of your installation media. You can verify this by running an md5 check on the media itself (such as a CD). A Windows program that I use is here: http://www.md5summer.org

If there have problems with the Mandriva install, I'd consider asking here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...splay.php?f=30

Nevermind, you already did. Cross-posting is a

Sorry about the cross posting. I posted it there, and thought it may do better here in hindsight.

Ctrl+alt+f1 does nothing at all.


I downloaded the md5summer but can't figure out how to use it.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything specific about Mandriva. I think you should stick to their forum (or Mandriva support) for installation problems.

Make sure that you have the right installation for your architecture. Since you have a GeForce FX5500, you either have the x86 (32-bit) or a 64-bit architecture. You probably would know if you have a 64-bit architecture, but it's just a thought.

If you just want to make sure the installatin CD does not have errors, here's how you use the md5summer program. Unzip the file you downloaded (I have the latest version 1.2.0.5). It contains two files: md5summer.exe and md5summer.md5. The md5summer.exe file is all you need. It caculates md5 sums (or md5 hashes) and compares it to the md5 sums provided for the given files (for instance, to a downloaded file or the contents of packages in a CD). You can make a trial run with it using the md5summer.md5 file: just double-click md5summer.exe, and in the new window choose the folder where md5summer.md5 is. Now click the button "Verify sums". That will open an "open file" dialogue where you can select md5summer.md5, which contains the md5 sum for md5summer.exe (which I guess should still be and needs to be in the same directory). md5summer will quickly caclulate the md5 sum of the file md5summer.exe, and then compare it to the value provided in md5summer.md5. If they agree, you will get a green button (there were no errors in your download or in the compression/decompression of the zip file). Otherwise, you'll get a red button for an error.

Note that md5 sums can be provided in simple text files. They don't have to have a .md5 extension, and certainly don't have to have the little puzzle icon that md5summer knows about.

Now that you've had a practice run, you can copy the md5summer executable to any location that makes sense for you; for example I created a directory "C:\Program Files\utils\md5summer" and pasted the md5summer.exe file there. Then make a shortcut to it from wherever you like, or else just remember where it's installed.

Here's how I check an installation CD against its md5 sum using md5summer. Insert the CD into the drive, and look in its main directory for a file with the name md5sum.txt or anything similar containing md5. Open that text file with any text editor to see that it does indeed have a list of md5 sums. For example, on a Debian CD, I find 1,859 md5 sum entries in the file md5sum.txt, and there are 1,871 files on the CD. The first entry looks like this:
30ab1ba2a9c09d1850f7a40b639624b3 ./dists/sarge/main/binary-i386/Release

The first part is the md5 sum, the second part is the path and file to which the md5 sum belongs. Close that md5 sum file and open the md5summer program. Select the CD drive, click "Verify sums", and then select the md5sum.txt file (or whatever file you found containing the md5 sums). Click "Open"; you are likely to get a message that says "The checksum file you have selected contains one or more ASCII generated sums ... Ignore and continue?", just click OK, and then wait while md5summer checks all of the files against their md5 sums.

You are likely to encounter some errors, even if there is actually not actually a problem with the CD. Typical errors that I get are mismatches between the listed location of a file and its actual location (i.e., the listed error is something like "D:\path\to\file\package.gz does not exists." when the file is actually located in "D:\alternate\path\to\file\package.gz) and the checksum of text files, such as HTML files, which are hardly critical for installation of Linux and are probably not actually wrong anyway.

If you find errors for system packages on the installation CD that are not due to path errors, then you may have had a corrupt download (there was an error during the download; you can also do md5 checksums for the downloaded .iso file) or there may have been an error during the CD burn process.

Hope that helps.