Video Problem on Laptop: Black screen after Knoppix boots up

[pizzat104]

This is my first time trying Knoppix. I tried searching for posts about my problem but was unsuccessful.

Here's the problem:

I load Knoppix and everything seems to work fine (I am trying to use Knoppix because Windows won't boot up). The start up sound plays and after a few seconds of having a blinking ursor on the command prompt screen, the screen goes black. I tried Knoppix on another laptop and the part where it goes black is when the Knoppix desktop should appear. I have an ATI Radeon Mobility graphics card.

Please help me solve this problem.

[Harry Kuhman]

I don't have "the" answer for you, but it seems likely that (as long as the disk was burnt at a slow speed) you need some "cheat codes" to help the boot process with hardware detection. Try following the documentation link near te top of this page and read up on cheat codes in the wiki. Common ones that sometimes help are nodma (assuning you are using version 5.0.1, you didn't say what version you have), noscsi, acpi=off, and any of the video related ones (there should be one that uses a generic video driver if you think it may be a video issue). And I like both the failsafe boot, which is an awful way to run but might let you learn what is going wrong in the boot process and also the expert mode boot so that you can answer hardware questions and take notes; if you find out what boot choice causes the lock-up, boot again and answer the question differently.

[pizzat104]

Thanks so much for your quick response!

I looked at the parameters for the failsafe (which worked), and figured out that it was the xmodule=vesa option that did the trick.

I'm currently using Knoppix to restore data, but if I wanted to permanently switch to use Knoppix or another distribution like Ubuntu (I'm a newbie with this stuff), how should I set up the installation? Would I need to use the default driver always and set it up that way during installation, or is there a way to set up the appropriate driver for my card?

I typed in lspci in the console; it says I have an ATI Radeon IGP 320M.

Thanks!

PS. I'm using version 5.01 of Knoppix.

[Harry Kuhman]

...but if I wanted to permanently switch to use Knoppix or another distribution like Ubuntu (I'm a newbie with this stuff), how should I set up the installation?.....
There are two types of people in the world. Those who think that installing Knoppix is a good idea in spite of all of the problems that are well known to come up when this is attempted and those who do not. I am not in the first of these two groups.

I see no reason to install a Live CD rather than a Linux distro intended for hard disk install. I have not evaluated Ubunto vs. Debian, but I have been pretty happy with a Debian etch install. Don't get me wrong, it's still Linux and cryptic and most of it is a mystery to me, but every once in a while I can grasp some of it. I kind of expect that either Debian or Ubuntu might install cleanly for you, but you are the best one to evaluate that. The nice thing is that all of the distro are freely available and you can install them and give them a try, then delete them and try something else if you want. It's not like paying big bucks to try a version of Windows only to learn it is worse than what you already had.