[melchizedek]

Hi All ,

Am totally new to Linux...so much so that I'm not even sure how to pronounce it properly...lol.

Anyway.......after getting my mandrake 9.1 download, before messing about installing it, I decided to give the SuSE evaluation disk a go, just to see how it ran.. As far As I can tell the SuSE disk I have is an evaluation disk that runs the O/s from disk, without the need to install.

Followed all the instructions that came with the disk...rebooted...and got a "Out of timing" message from my monitor. After this message I can't alter any of the monitiors settings any more...although I have no idea what to alter if I could.. The screen is dark...although I suspect the OS is running, but for some reason I can't see anything. I say this cos I hit enter and the CD drive started running when I hit enter.....so I'm assuming there's something going on...I just can't see it.

Any ideas guys....I'm loathe to run Mandrake for fear of it not working...since I'm assuming driver support etc will be similar between the two programs. Hence, if SuSE won't work, I'm surmising Mandrake will have a similar problem.

Any suggestions ?

Kind regards...mel

[aspicer]

It is "Linux" Pronounced "Lih Nucks". Linus is Linus Torwalds who initially programmed the Linux Operating System Kernel on a 386 computer, deriving from another free Teaching Unix-like OS "Minix".

It sounds like you might have a graphics card compatability problem. You may want to try a Text-mode installation and see how that works out. You will see a "boot:" prompt at that prompt, type "text"

(like this

boot: text

(and press Enter).

My suggestion for a New User to Linux is to use RedHat Linux. The installation is very good and easy in recent versions.

Anyway what I think may be happening is you are waiting past the 60-seconds or are just pressing Enter, and the Graphical X-Window System is starting ... but it is not working with your graphics card.

[lynch]

SuSE's eval-disk makes you do alot of setting up-much like an actual install.If you want to test out Linux this way,check out Knoppix
Doing a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or hitting the spacebar might get rid of that black screen.
HTH
lynch

[aspicer]

* The last SuSE I used was back in 6.2. I liked it then. They have become TOO commercial. Which will probably kill them in the personal market. Not many will recommend it if noone can run it.

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Yes. restart the X server. Ctrl-Alt-F1 go to an regular VC - Virtual Console. May be able to see some X Server error logging output.

I'd go ahead, like I said before, and do a Text mode install. See if X configuration then picks up the graphics card configuration. Or else some old-fashioned X config testing are in order. He should find out what his graphics hardware is and do some Google.com research. Oh! He said "GeForce 2". That's Nvidia. Nvidias web site has Linux driver suite complete with install. I've got the so so ... TNT2 hardware myself. The Nividia driver install works wonders!

(I don't know why he is having such a problem though. The install should be detecting that card. )

I'm not a big fan of Mandrake either .... I'd burn some Red Hat ISO's and try a Red Hat Linux installation.

[melchizedek]

Ah...thanks for the help guys...I messed around with the settings and finally got it working.

For a non technically minded person like myself however...I'm finding it hard work. As I can't connect to the net through linux at the moment, I'm having to go to windows, read up stuff on the net, and then reboot all the time.

Very tedious....still...I'm persevering. Am desperately trying to set up my modem at the moment...only to find out it's not as easy as I'd imagined...Still...I love a good challenge.

Cheers Guys.....mel

[aspicer]

Red Hat has some nice Graphical Wizards for setting up networking, including dial-up, Ethernet, and DSL. Other than that you have a lot of complicated things that interact to set-up. There are howto's on that stuff though. I would expect SuSE and Mandrake and whatever to have such wizards as well. There's no need any more these days for networking Linux on to the Internet to be so complicated.