I have a clean install of slackware 13.37, downloaded today from slackware64current. On boot, I get a black screen - not just black, but no video signal out of the video card, or at least nothing that the monitor recognizes.

Fortunately, I can ssh into the box from another machine. If I do, I can startx and xfce starts up and appears as expected.

lspci shows:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 9714
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6898

I have an onboard video chipset with a monitor connected to it, and an ATI 5970 in a pcie slot with a monitor also connected to it. xfce appears on the pcie card (the 5970) as expected, as this is (supposedly) the primary monitor, and the monitor connected to the onboard video output is blank - no signal, also as expected as I have not yet installed the ATI drivers.

So the question is - how do I get the terminal output on bootup to appear on one of my monitors? I'm not sure where it is going, and this is out out of my area of expertise.

edit: At the blank screen, I can actually login and startx, and it works, even though I see nothing on the screen. So Slack is booting up, and there is a terminal I can access, just no video output.

Perhaps this?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...1337-a-867832/

I know I'm not loosing it...

So, reboot. Terminal appears on monitor as expected. Weird. Maybe should have rebooted before making this post, but hey, this isn't Windows, you should not have to reboot just because you passed gas like you do with Windows but I digress...

startx

xfce now appears on primary monitor, not secondary monitor. Weirder. OK, install ATI drivers. Works. Enable xinerma. Works. Except mouse pointer is corrupt on secondary monitor. Set AccelMethod to EXA, as this has fixed the problems for others, no joy.

Any suggestions on how to fix corrupt mouse pointer on second monitor?

That appears to have to do with XDM. I'm not using XDM, and besides that issue is supposedly fixed in current, which I downloaded just this morning.

For blank screen on boot and solution, albeit with intel GPU, see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tdowns-866803/

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Number 1 sounds like what I saw, even though I'm using Phenom. Strangely enough, it only did it on the first boot after install - it has not happened since <shrug>...

Now that I think of it, I did dinker with lilo.conf, and ran lilo again. I'm guessing that was what actually fixed it, even though I did not know it at the time.