dell dimension L700cx
P III 933mhz
384mb RAM
evga GeForce FX5200

trying to install sidux 2009.02.

installation cd boots for about 1 minute and blacks out.

then big red & white sign appears, slowly rotating around screen says “sync out of range”, and am unable to continue installation.

anyone know anything about this?

It means that the installer is switching to graphic (VGA) mode, and that your monitor cannot handle this mode. When the monitor is of the same age as the computer, it is a bit outdated, and the FX5200 is well capable of producing a graphic signal which this monitor cannot handle.
That is a fault of the installer though, it should have chosen a video mode which could be handled by any monitor produced after 1986.

You could try to finish the installation with another more modern monitor, change the VGA mode and put back the older monitor.

Or maybe the installer offers somewhere an option to adjust the VGA mode or switch to text mode during install. Text mode is surest, otherwise choose 1024 x 768 at 60 Hz.

If all of these are impossible, choose another distro, which would be a sad reason.

jlinkels

thanks jlinkels,

tried your suggestions w/no success.

anyway......just realized there's a 250 watt psu minimum on that graphics card & the machine only has a 145 watt psu.

could this be the problem?

interesting; the machine has 2 other debian based partitions that work well.

Yes, and the box also says that the card is Windows 98SE, NTSP6, ME, 2000, XP. (I happen to have two in my shelf yet to be installed)

... however if you tried a different monitor with better specs and you still get this error...

You didn't tell that.

Usually, I would say, no! this cannot be a power supply problem. Certainly not if you have running two other installations.

However... 145 Watts IS underrated for a system like this running a 900 MHz PIII. And the FX5200 docs state that 12V 18A is needed for this card, which is around 200 Watts. Not that I believe that, because the mounted heatsink with passive cooling can only dissipate 20-30 Watts. Guessed that, did not calculate.

If you would have asked me in advance whether this would give problems, I would have denied it. Now you have the problems I could explain it afterwards as Sidux might switch the card to some more optimized mode which just draws momentarily too much power. It is on the edge you see. Not impossible, but not the first thing which comes to mind.

Is there no way to install Sidux in text mode like good ol' Debian, and write a customized xorg.conf which would be a copy of your Debian's xorg.conf.

Otherwise I would advise to try and take a different video card, the most sorry and underrated device that you can find and try again.

jlinkels