Roger Wilco
05-18-2004, 02:11 PM
There is a serious issue with booting systems with 2 graohic cards (using the May 10 Knoppix)
I have a Matrox G200 on-board chip and a NVidia Geforce 4 MX PCI card. The BIOS is set to use the NVidia card.
Upon booting everything goes nicely until the X loading part, when the screen just blanks outt (but KDE goes on loading, you can hear the welcome sound, etc).
The reason for this is that for some reason knoppix uses the mga driver, which is of course no correct. The solution is the xmodule=nv kernel parameter, BUT it is NOT documented in the F2 os F3 help screens (I remembered it from knoppix 3.2) (It is probably buried on the CD with other docs)
Now, I am not exactly a newbie with linux and I know my system inside out, so the culprit was easy to locate. Knoppix, however should be (and mostly is) the no brainer, "your-ma-can-use-linux-too" type of distro. My ma would be in a shock if there were only a dark screen after booting, thinking she broke the machine.
I have a Matrox G200 on-board chip and a NVidia Geforce 4 MX PCI card. The BIOS is set to use the NVidia card.
Upon booting everything goes nicely until the X loading part, when the screen just blanks outt (but KDE goes on loading, you can hear the welcome sound, etc).
The reason for this is that for some reason knoppix uses the mga driver, which is of course no correct. The solution is the xmodule=nv kernel parameter, BUT it is NOT documented in the F2 os F3 help screens (I remembered it from knoppix 3.2) (It is probably buried on the CD with other docs)
Now, I am not exactly a newbie with linux and I know my system inside out, so the culprit was easy to locate. Knoppix, however should be (and mostly is) the no brainer, "your-ma-can-use-linux-too" type of distro. My ma would be in a shock if there were only a dark screen after booting, thinking she broke the machine.