Hi,

I did a fresh install of One 2008 Spring on my aunt's PC. The live booted up OK, Mandriva started and the live install went OK. So I did setup a few users, a bit of KDE config and then went to do terminate session and the user interface disappeared (it seemed to crash) and no more prompt, nothing! I then restarted and half way the booting process it stopped with no messages or command prompt just a black screen. I tried the safe mode and it booted on the command line but when I type xinit then a flash on the screen and it all becomes black. I tought it may be the APCI problem so I added nolapic noapic apci=off on the command line of GRUB but nothing...
I then tried to reboot from the live disk but again no joy :( Anyone any ideas? My aunt is very depressed and so I am :(

Thanks!

It seems to simply be a "broken" X configuration.
Try and boot on the command line (safe mode), and configure it anew with:


Yves.

Wow, you were right, it's a monitor config problem. The monitor she has it's an old CRT one. I still have not configured it but I tried with another flat screen monitor and it worked. I now need to find out how to configure the CRT. When I change the monitor settings and do test it goes black so I cannot even see how to leave the test Any pointers?

Thank you!!!!

I have deleted the xorg.config file and created a new one. Now Mandriva starts OK with the CRT monitor too but the text, windows and icons look huge. I am using the same resolution as Win XP does with the the same monitor so it's not a resolution setting problem.
I am really not sure what it can be :( Any ideas?

Thanks!

Finally I figured it out! 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'-' did the trick, now nice small size thanks again!

As a final thing I now believe that the corrupt of the xorg file in the first place was caused by using the exit session button.
Can it be right?

Thanks

I don't think the exit button can be at fault. Apart from bad luck, I don't see what could have caused your problem…

As for 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'-', it is indeed a nice trick to know. Unfortunately, it won't keep your prefered resolution between reboots. For that, look at "gnome-display-properties" (Gnome), krandrtray (KDE), or xrandr (generic).

Yves.

I will not try it on my aunt PC again but on 2 out of 2 occasions Mandriva (X11 as you pointed out) crashed when I did close session (close session, not stop or restart the PC). As you said maybe it was just bad luck, we can leave this one to the futures generations

Many thanks for your help, brilliant as usual!

I experienced a similar problem with the fglrx driver on my notebook, but since I don't need 3D there I just used the vesa-driver.

Ah, OK so maybe it was because I used the proprietary ATI driver... Anyway my aunt now is happy with her new Linux install and is already using her digital camera so I will leave it her for a bit

Thanks!