Booting problem: monitor shutdown

[Harry Kuhman]

i was booting knoppix dvd live 5.1 version and my display (monitor) shut down, but iam pretty sure that the knoppix start becouse i heard something like "starting" or something like this, (from the headphones)

i think it could be the refresh rate, but i dont know enything abaut linux, so... i dont know what to do :P

my computer is a dual amd, 2gb, the video is a nvidia 7900.
the siplay is old, is a proview (not flat, not lcd, a normal one) 15", vga... the monitor frecuency is in windows (spanish) "60 hercios" i think in english is something like Hz

Hi,

From what you have written I suspect a scan rate problem also. There is a good chance that Knoppix is trying to drive the display at higher scan rates than it can process, and to protect itself the monitor is shutting down. Of course, it could be something else, but this would be the first thing that I would suspect. Abd it may also be a screen size 9issue (which is closely related to scan rates).

There are parameters that can be passed to Knoppix at boot time, often called cheat codes. There is a cheat codes document that you got automatically if you downloaded by BitTorrent. If you downloaded from a mirror you should be able to go back abd get the cheat codes file, it is very small. Alternately, you could follow the documentation link near the top of this page and read the cheat codes section of the wiki, a collection of documents that any user here can help edit.

To get the right settings for you, the best choice would be to find the documentation that came with your monitor and select setting in range. If you can't find the documentation, try looking for it on the web. Other approaches would be to pick values that are very conservative, or to determine what values Windows uses for the monitor. A few codes to get you started would include the following:

screen=1280x1024 
    Use specified Screen resolution for X 


xvrefresh=60 or vsync=60 
    Use 60 Hz vertical refresh rate for X 


xhrefresh=80 or hsync=80 
    Use 80 kHz horizontal refresh rate for X

For rexample, you might type in knoppix hsync=50 vsync=60 at the knoppix boot prompt. Read the full document for more information or other codes if these don't resolve your problem.