Installing Mandriva One

[neonsox]

Hi folks,

 

I'm trying to install Mandriva One on a living room PC. I burned the disk, checked the image, etc, and everything is fine with that. The graphics card in the PC is an old Radeon 9200se and I'm connecting to my living room TV via the S-Video output on the card. I can get to the bootloader and even safe mode displays fine, but when I try the normal "linux", I get a garbled screen as if the resolution is totally off.

 

When I hook the PC up to a normal monitor (LCD flat-screen VGA analog), I get nothing but a black screen, almost as if the video card switches everything over to S-Video output. I was able to get a picture when I used the on-board graphics VGA port, and that's where I was able to do the installation to the hard drive. Since then, upon rebooting from the install, I get a black screen on the monitor regardless of which VGA port I use and I get this garbled mess on the living room TV. By the way, it's just a regular TV (not HiDef or anything).

 

I tried locating the X11 folder but all I could find was X11R6 or something. I am unclear on how to configure all that from a command line anyway (Linux novice here).

 

Any help or suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

PC Specs:

AMD Duron 1400+ Pro (1.0 GHz)

512 MB DDR RAM

80 GB ATA HD

Radeon 9200se 128MB

[ilia_kr]

Well, you should check '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' - the X display manager configuration file. You can post your xorg.conf here, so we could see how it is configured and possibly help you.

[ianw1974]

I would press CTRL-ALT-F1 to get a console prompt, then login as root and enter the password you configured during installation.

 

Then type:

 

mcc

 

at the console, and it will allow you to choose Display, to configure the display, and I would suggest, changing from ATI (fglrx) if that is what is configured, and change it to VESA instead. This will give you basic graphics, then you can reboot, and see if the GUI comes up without all the garbage.

 

If ATI (fglrx) isn't selected on the display, then try this option first to see if it works, then switch to VESA later if you still have problems.

[neonsox]

I would press CTRL-ALT-F1 to get a console prompt, then login as root and enter the password you configured during installation.

 

Then type:

 

mcc

 

at the console, and it will allow you to choose Display, to configure the display, and I would suggest, changing from ATI (fglrx) if that is what is configured, and change it to VESA instead. This will give you basic graphics, then you can reboot, and see if the GUI comes up without all the garbage.

 

If ATI (fglrx) isn't selected on the display, then try this option first to see if it works, then switch to VESA later if you still have problems.

 

I'll give this a shot later this afternoon. But now that you mention it, I was never asked for a password or anything like that. I assume I didn't finish the installation process then...

 

To the first reply... There doesn't appear to be an X11 folder in ETC, just X11R6 and there's nothing in there as I recall. I will also look at this and post back later. Thanks for the ideas thus far though.

Edited July 3, 2006 by neonsox

[ianw1974]

There definitely should be, here is screen output from mine:

 

[ian@europa ~]$ [ian@europa ~]$ ls /etc | grep X11
X11/

 

I've just done this to filter results using the grep command, however, if you just do a basic "ls /etc" command, you'll get everything listed here, and X11 will be in amongst the full list.

[neonsox]

Well an update...

 

I used the "mcc" command when in the failsafe mode and was able to configure things enough to the point where I can at least log in. I also have tried configuring the xorg.conf file using "xorgconfig" as root and can not seem to find the right configuration to get a legible display. It's a normal TV, so I tried to use the lowest settings possible (such as 640x280 8-bit or whatever it is, 35.1 VGA horizontal or vertical, and 50-70 horizontal or verticle). Please excuse my lack of knowledge on the specifics.

 

So now what? I'm at least logged in and into the command line; now I just need to get KDE up and running on a Television. Any further suggestions?

 

Edit: When I type "kde" at the command line, it tries to start up, but I get an error that states: Cannot run in framebuffer mode. So I'm not sure where to go from here. If I go into Linux normally from the bootloader, I get a garbled screen. If I try KDE via command line, the error comes up.

Edited July 4, 2006 by neonsox

[ianw1974]

Failsafe you'll probably have problems with. The best thing to do is this. Boot normally, let it get the garbled screen. Then press CTRL-ALT-F1, this will give you a command prompt you can then login as root and enter the password you gave during install.

 

Then, type:

 

service dm stop

 

this will stop the running display. Now, I would suggest doing:

 

mcc

 

and configure your display for VESA if the ones you've tried have failed. Once you've configured this, then do:

 

service dm start

 

and the display will start. If it doesn't automatically switch to this screen, then press CTRL-ALT-F7 to get the gui, and then attempt to login.

[neonsox]

Ok, I tried using VESA at a low resolution. Upon booting, the system will go through the motions and then restart. So something isn't liking the VESA. I read something about how ATI cards need special drivers or configuration settings to be able to work with S-Video out. Anybody know anything about this? I'm going to try and configure the graphics using "mcc" some more, but I'm starting to lose hope here. I just need this thing to display on the living room TV. No 3D acceleration or anything intensive needed.

 

Thank you so far though. I hope this will be solved.

[SoulSe]

You do need the ATI drivers if you wish to make use of special card features, such as the video out. Any generic driver would, obviously, not be able to handle this.

 

But first, checkout the ATI website, find your card and see if that feature is supported by the drivers (specific to your card) before potentially wasting more time on it.

[neonsox]

The card is supported and I have managed to install the latest driver from the command line. I guess the trick is now configuring it to work with TV Output (S-Video in particular). The forums over at ATI are very sparse with some solid info on how to do this. "aticonfig" works, but looks complicated, and I'm not sure how it interacts with xorg 6.9, so I have been hesitant to change anything.

 

Any ideas? I feel as though I'm almost there...

[neonsox]

Well, to just follow up... I've been able to at least get things running using the VESA drivers, which will be fine considering I don't plan on doing much with 3D or graphical programs. I'm not sure what the difference is, because I wasn't able to use the VESA drivers when I tried to before.

 

All I did was install the proprietary drivers from ATI and I made some changes via 'aticonfig'. You can get a list of options available by typing 'aticonfig |more' and reading through the various commands for your particular setup. Upon setting the driver to TV, NTSC-M, and specifying the hsync and vsync for the TV, I was then able to go into the 'mcc' and set things to a low enough resolution so that I could at least get into KDE. From there, it was just some small adjustments to make the lower resolution usable.

 

Hopefully, I can figure out how to get 3D acceleration on here without various complicated or outdated methods such as the GATOS project or "atitvout", not that I'm dumping on their respective efforts by any means. It's yet another thing Linux (or should I say ATI) needs to catch up on right out of the box.

 

Thanks everybody for your assistance.