installing Fedora Core 4 on laptop problems

[connected27]

I just got Fedora Core 4 from a semi recent "Linux Format" magazine issue. And I have some installation problems. I'll try my very best to outline some steps I've taken:


1.) Pop in the CD to the CD-rom drive.
2.) Press F12 to boot off/detect the CD.
3.) I'm presented with the "Fedora Core" installation screen that tells me the options where I can install linux in graphical mode or text mode.
(Its basically the screen before linux detects the hardware)
4.) I press enter and the hardware is detected.
5.) I get to the screen that asks me if I want to test the CD media.
I usually "skip" that part, but I've also tried the part where it checks the media for me.
6.) My video card is detected, but when I get to the graphical screen that's supposed to show up in the beginning of the installation, then a cursor shows then disappears and nothing, but a silver box is shown in the middle of the screen and it just hangs.

The strange part of this entire thing is I tried passing the "linux text" pre installation wise, as the parameters so I can install linux the old fashioned way and it works, but then AFTER I install and configure everything and I'm told to restart my computer and I do just that, linux boots up to the graphical screen, but nothing is on the screen. So I'm left wondering whether I have a buggy disk or whatnot? I've never had this happen before on my laptop with a redhat distribution and at this point I don't know what to do. Anyway, if anyone can help I'll be SO glad for any tips and pointers. Here are my laptop specs:


TOSHIBA SATELLITE 1805-S274 LAPTOP
Pentium 3 1.1 GHZ :lol:
256MB of system Ram
20 GB Hard Drive space
Windows OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
Name TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-R2102
Name ALi Audio Accelerator WDM Driver
Manufacturer Acer Laboratories Inc.


VIDEO CARD: (16MB video memory ) Name Trident Video Accelerator CyberBlade XP Ai1 v6.4022- 016B.22ICDNP
Adapter Type Trident CyberBlade XP Ai1, Trident compatible

 

[bmouring]

Hmm, that is a bit odd.

Do any of the "hang screens" look like this

Basically, I have two suggestions:
If you really like the RedHat way of things, start up the machine and then on the GRUB boot screen,
hit any key to get to the boot menu,
hit 'e' to edit the Fedora entry,
select the line starting with "kernel",
hit 'e' again to edit that line,
and at the very end add "single", without the quotes.

This will drop you into single-user mode, a great thing to know how to get to if you're having problems booting a system.

My first thing I'd check at this point is the X logs to see what issues there may be graphically. They should reside in /var/log/Xorg.#.log, # being a number, typically 0. You may either casually browse the log [code:1:535d895126]less /var/log/Xorg.#.log[/code:1:535d895126] or look for the problems straightaway [code:1:535d895126]grep -E \(EE\|WW\) /var/log/Xorg.#.log[/code:1:535d895126]

You may aso wish to browse the latest kernel messages for any issues that may be (located at /var/log/messages)

If you have access to a decent internet connection, I would suggst either downloading the latest Fedora Core or trying out one of the other newer user friendly distros like one of the Ubuntus (especially Xubuntu since it should run better on your hardware) or SuSE or (especially considering your hardware) Damn Small Linux.

 

[linux_0]

bmouring made great suggestions :-D


X11 / X.org is failing to start either because your VGA or your LCD is not set correctly. Most likely the latter.


After you boot into single user mode try:

system-config-display

then select your VGA and LCD display from the list and see if that works.

GL :-D