ok fellas, i have tried, Suse 10, Mandrake 10, Ubuntu 5.10, Fedora 4 and 5.

out of all of those only Mandrake 10 works on my laptop, what gives.

basically at some point during the install the xserver either can not initize the video or it loses video.

With Fedora 5 once it hits the install part where it wants the type of language and keybaord it loses video.

suse gets all the way thru til the reboot and then cant produce a video signal..

mandrake works fine

ubuntu same thing fails to show video right away..


so whats up fellas why are these brand new distro's not even tested... i mean seriously my laptop is nothing special..
2.13 Dothan
1gig ddr2
x700 pci-e w/ 128meg dedicated ram
60gig hd
wireless and wired network


basically Suse, Fedora, and ubunu all appear to be working i just dont have any video..

i think it was .. hhmm one of those i cant recall made it to the desktop but every 10 seconds kept stopping and saying another xserver is trying to start do you want to allow it to start.. i said no or yes the screen would go back to the console and i would have to hit ctrl-alt F whatever number to bring it back then 10 seconds later it would do it again.

i like Mandriva but prefer Suse, and im ok with Fedora thats why i wanted to try 5.

but what is the deal here, ive seen other random people reporting the same thing.

has linux gotten to be in such a rush to put out more distro's that they arent even tested ? seems that way...

ATI cards don't have the best linux support. Mostly that's due to ATI not wanting to be very helpful (although they're apparently getting better). Most of the distros you tried are newer "bleeding edge" type distros. They are bound to have some hiccups. That's part of the process of using a bleeding edge distro. If you want a stable tried and true distro, try Debian Sarge (stable and generally used on production servers). Of course, using a stable tried and true distro, you lose newer hardware support without a kernel recompile and you also lose the use of new programs. You might be using program versions that are fairly old (for example Debian Sarge uses firefox 1.0.4...)

every version i want works one of my desktops with a 9600 XT of course thats AGP and not pci-express like my laptop.

just odd that mandriva 10 works fine and Fedora 5 which just came out and suse 10 dont...

is there a common command at boot to force all of these distro's to run in frame buffer mode.

all i recall is DSL and the fb1024 command for frame buffer mode @ 1024x768..

heck even Damn small linux works.. and that aint seen an update in how long ?

I know in general you can get a safe working video with the VESA driver at install time (did it ever ask you what video driver to pick?).

In ubuntu, you can dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and select either the "ati" driver or the "vesa" driver.

nope vesa dont work and thats whats totally screwed up.

with Fedora 5, and ubuntu it should automatically be choosing vesa,, and if it is,.. it aint working.

with suse if i chose vesa it accepts it after trying several different resolutions. but after it tries to boot to the login it loses video.. i can loging and hear the suse startup music but no video..

nothing that i know of makes it work..

frustrating very frustrating.