[wegoulet]

I am using an
ATI Radeon 7000 series PCI video card with 64Mb memory
AMD athlon 1600 cpu
1024 Mb ram
dual boot Windows XP SP2
ubuntu 7.04

Shortly after booting into ubuntu (whether I start a different application or not) ubuntu gives me a black screen. The only recourse I have is to perform a hard restart.

I have checked the AMD/ATI support site and it has no Linux drivers for my video card.

Any help with this problem would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[arochester]

Is it totally black, or is there a small flashing cursor in the top left corner?

Try pressing Alt-F1. That will move to a different virtual console. (Similarly Alt-F1 to Alt-F12 to select the consoles tty1 to tty12; Right Alt-F1 gives tty13 and so on.)

If that doesn't work try pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc to swith out of X; or Alt-F5 or whatever will switch back.

[wegoulet]

I have been doing some investigating myself on this matter. it appears that X.org could possibly provide the answer.

My question is: Can I d/l the tar.gz onto my c: drive and then access that to install the update intp ubuntu 7.04.

[lotuseclat79]

Try the following links for help:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=480605
http://www.linux.com/base/ldp/howto/...WTO/video.html
http://linux.die.net/man/4/radeon
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Download

Without a working video driver, I am not at all entirely certain how to go about installing one without at least a terminal window. I would certainly visit the Ubuntu forums at http://www.ubuntuforums.org and ask the question. Use the Search facility there and search for "ATi Radeon 7000".

What you might be able to do is to use a Fiesty Live CD, download the appropriate driver from the last link above (choose the latest), gunzip and untar it into the memory file system and build a list of where all of the files get installed - since you do not have a working video card, you may have to replace it with one that works (temporarily) in order to accomplish the above task.

Then the idea is to capture a list of the files that were installed in which directories. From that list you can then build a tar file of the installed files list and save it or copy it to the hard disk where the files reside - after mounting the hard drive with Fiesty on it.

Build the new tar file like this after you have built the installed list of files:
# cd /
# tar -cf ./radeon-7000-installed-list.tar `cat radeon-7000-installed.list`

After you have mounted the hard drive, cd to / and then untar the file:
# tar -xf ./radeon-7000-installed-list.tar

Remember, build the list file in the RAM file system, tar the installed file list, and then mount the hard disk, and then untar the tar file of the installed file list that was installed with the Live CD environement.

That is what I would try anyway.

-- Tom

[wegoulet]

Hi lotuseclat79,

Prehaps I have given the wrong impression. I have a semi-working video driver. The default that loaded when I installed ubuntu 7.04.

After several minutes the screen goes black with no flashing cursor or it does a flashy color show.

I am able to, as was suggested, use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a terminal mode and reboot from there.

Hope this helps answer some questions you had.

I will follow up on the links you provided and advise

[wegoulet]

Have been using ubuntu 7.04 for several hours now and it hasn't hiccuped once. I can't say for certain how the video was solved but my guess is that after all the updates were installed and ubuntu was rebooted the situation was corrected.

Thanks to all who supported me through the trials and tribulations of getting my ubuntu up and running.

[arochester]

Great news! I was going to say that if you could access your computer you could reconfigure x-server and how. But I won't for now. If you have any more problems please come back.