Screen Problems With Red Hat 9

[iaresean]

Hi All;

I have finally become comfortable enough with linux at work for me to consider putting it on my pc at home. But, alas, I was struck down with a problem. I formatted my hard drive and got it ready for the installation, popped in the cd, and booted off of it. The installation screen loaded and I just pressed enter to enter into the gui installation, like I always do. I skipped the media test of the cd's, then linux started searched for my monitor, but didn't find it:
Monitor: unprobed.
It found my mouse:
Mouse: PS/2.
And it found something else, I forget what. Then as soon as it loads the next screen, my monitor goes all fuzzy. My guess was that the frequency was out, probably because it didn't find my monitor correctly.
I passed this off and restarted, and then I typed 'linux lowres', to start the lowres installation, but the exact same thing happened at the exact same point.
Again I shrugged it off and restarted and then I typed 'linux text', to do the installation in text mode. This went perfectly, and I was now able to select my monitor from a list (compaq 140). I had to choose the 'generic geforce FX' driver for my geforce FX5200, which I wasn't worried about because I do have the proper linux drivers on disk for my graphics card. The installation completed succesfully, and the reboot began. I thought for sure it is going to work now, since I specified exactly what type of monitor I have. But again I was hit with the fuzzy screen, exactly when the gui was supposed to load up.

Does anybody here know what is going on. I know it's a pretty old monitor, I just haven't gotten round to buying a new one yet. But now isn't a good time to buy one since I got robbed this month. I have been on a tight budget. Plus technology is more expensive in SA, than it is overseas.

Here are my system specs, if it helps:
Monitor: Compaq 140
Motherboard: Jetway Polaris 400
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce FX5200
RAM: 512mb DDR400

THANK YOU FOR ANY AND ALL HELP IN ANY FORM OR AMOUNT!

Sean.

 

[ericbrunson]

Dude, you are so screwed!

Not really. ;-)

Use CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a text console and log in as root.

Run the following:

wget \ [URL unfurl="true"]http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-5336/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run[/URL]

Then install the package with:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run

Read the README and edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config replacing:

Driver "nv"
(or Driver "vesa")
with
Driver "nvidia"

 

[iaresean]

Thanks for the advice, it definitely helped out. I tried out the Ctrl+Alt+F1 but it didn't yield the expected results because 'first-boot' was trying to run. I ended up re-installing and I noticed that the final screen has an option to boot up on a gui or text mode.

I chose text mode.
Logged in.
Mounted my cd-rom.
Downloaded the drivers off my cd.
Installed them.
Edited /etc/X11/XF86Config.
Then I typed startx, hit enter...and voila!

Thanks for your help again.


Sean.