I'm having problems installing suse oss. I downloaded the 5 iso images and burned them onto the cds. When the installation starts, I checked all the cds using the install option and it said they were all okay. It then gets all the way to the part where it starts the installation. It shows the status bar on the side and says that it is installing. After 20 minutes or so it sys its done and is going to restart the system. Well the first time I left the disc in and it just booted from the disc again. Confused I just redid the installation. The next time I took out the cd and let it boot. It showed suse 10 so i hit enter and it acted like it was going to start but just froze when it says running /etc/init.d/boot.local. So I restarted the machine again, but this time in failsafe mode. Right after it gets to the part I mentioned before, it says PANIC: segmentation violation at 0xffffe420! sleeping for 30 seconds and then just freezes. Am I missing something with the rest of the CDs? Could this be caused by my video card. I was having troubles with ubuntu freezing at startup when i tried to use my video card instead of onboard video. Is this a similar issue? Any suggestions?

ps.

when i switch from my video card to onboard video, the problem ceases...so i guess it wasn't just ubuntu causing the issue. Does anyone know why this would happen everytime?

Just to reitirate...if my video card is plugged in(geforce mx4000) and its set in the bios, then linux won't boot, but if i set the bios to onboard video and plug the monitor into my motherboard, then there are no issues. Does anyone know why this would happen?

while i cant answer the question about your addon video board, i can tell you that the suse install uses the first cd to install the base system and then reboots. you should not have to do anything when it restarts. the installation will continue and it will ask for the second cd and so on until it is finished. the way suse cd's boot your pc it defaults to the hard drive, you have to choose to install on the first cd. that is why when it is done you dont have to take it out as the cd will boot the installation on the hard drive and then ask for disc 2.

sorry i cant help with the video problem

thanks for the help. I managed to get through the install just using my onboard video. When the system loaded, the video was really bad and it turned out that it was detecting my monitor weird. I changed that, and the video looked good. I then disabled the onboard video through yast and set my card as the default. No matter what I do though, linux won't boot while I have my card set as default and plugged in. What I got to work was having the onboard video set as default and getting into suse. Then if I unplug the monitor from the motherboard and into my card it works. So something is wrong with my card booting into linux, but the card itself works once I get linux going. I'm not sure what to do here.

I don't know why you are experiencing this behaviour. But if I read your post correctly, you can get SuSE linux to work with your card via a round-about-method.

I recommend you first backup your xorg.conf file to a place where you can install it easy from a konsole/text-loggin.

Then, I suggest, with SuSE showing video from your card, that you go to YAST > HARDWARE > GRAPHICS CARD and MONITOR. This will launch sax2. Then under card and monitor properties, configure your graphic card, selecting a VERY conservative resolution. Be certain to test this. Then after you finish, exit Yast. Then log out of KDE and log back in. Does it work?

You might have to disable the onboard video in BIOS to get your GeForce card to work.

Hi thanks for your suggestions. I haven't been able to get the system to boot with the bios disabled. When I set it to off and to find a video card, then suse hangs on the boot. If I enable the onboard video, once suse has booted I'm able to switch to my graphics card. Which is weird. I did disable the onboard video in sax2 so now what happens is whenever suse boots, the onboard video drops out and I have to switch to my graphics card. So I know the card will work in suse, it just doesn't like to boot when I have the onboard video switched off in bios. Which is annoying because I have to make multiple card/bios switches everytime I want to go from windows to linux and vice versa. Is it possible that a bios update would help?

I only recommend a BIOS update to people who are trying to solve a problem and know what they are doing. (As you are probably aware, some hobbyists will flash their BIOS just so they can have the "latest" and then complain that the update went bad and they now have a dead system.) Still, if you believe you are up to the task, it would probably be a good idea to check the site of the manufacturer that made your motherboard and see if they do have an update. It may contain a fix for just such a problem as this. Good luck in any case.

i may try to flash the bios tonight. im not sure that it will provide any help as the one on the dell site is from 2003 and I believe that I may be up to date on it already. Who knows though, it might be what I am looking for. Does anyone else have a suggestion?

so I flashed the bios and got the exact same results. So in a random moment, i threw in an old knoppix cd i had and it worked perfectly with the bios set and the video card plugged in. So i thought i would just download the new knoppix and install that...not so much. I get the same problems with knoppix 4 as i did with ubuntu and suse. So for now I've installed knoppix 3.6 and everything works fine. Is this possibly an issue with a new kernel version that my computer doesn't like or vice versa?

Very interesting. If you type the following command in a terminal

uname -r

it will return the kernel being used. Knoppix 3.6 was supplied with both 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.

its running linux kernel 2.4.7. are there any drawbacks to this? this definately is nothing more than a play around OS as im still using windows as my main OS. If its not really going to cause any issue, i believe ill just keep it the way it is.

There is nothing wrong with the 2.4 kernel. I believe that even the most recent Slackware distro is still using 2.4.x. The newer kernels support newer hardware and devices and apparently in some cases have lost support for the older hardware. In any event, if you want to investigate other distros, you might check and confirm that they are using a 2.4.x kernel, and they may work well with your system.