praveenmarkandu Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 these are my system specs: Acer TravelMate 4102WLMi: Pentium M 1.73GHz, 533MHZ FSB, 2MB L2 cache | 512MB DDR2 (2x256MB in dual chanel) |60GB HDD, 7200rpm | DVD-RW | ATI Mobility Radeon X700 64MB (PCI-e) | 15.4" WXGA wide TFT LCD | 802.11b/g wireless | Bluetooth | okay. this is my problem. install goes fine until the last stage where i have to choose a graphics driver. as you can see i have an ATI Mobility x700 PCI-E. i dont know what graphics driver to choose. i've tried VESA which didnt work and i also tried Vendor/ATI/Radeon which also didnt work. i get to a boot screen with options when i boot up. but after that my screen goes blank probably cause i have chosen the wrong drivers. i just downloaded "fglrx_4_3_0-8.26.18-1.i386.rpm" from ATIs driver page for linux notebook graphics. im pretty sure this is my hallelujah but how do i install this when i dont have a sceen to see what im doing? and what media do i put this RPM in? CD? DVD? Flash drive? on my HDD on a different partition? please help me. i really wanna migrate off this micro$oft crap i've been using for too long. TIA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 First, boot the system. When you are up and running, press CTRL-ALT-F1 to get a console screen. Then login as root, and enter the password you gave during install. Then: service dm stop to stop the existing running instance of X and KDE that you can't see. Now go to the directory that you downloaded the fglrx......rpm file and then do this: rpm -Uvh fglrx.......rpm full name required, although you can just type fglrx and press the tab key to complete it. Once that's installed, try doing: mcc and then choose display, and configure your graphics card again. Then type: reboot and hopefully your system will be working OK with the new drivers. If not, login to the console screen again, as I think I heard people mention an option called aticonfig that you can run to configure the display. Oh, and welcome to the board Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
praveenmarkandu Posted July 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 the thumbnail is my disk what my HDD consist off. C is my windows installation. D and E are my data and music. all are NTFS formatted. X is upartitioned space and not formatted. if i load mandriva onto drive X and then choose to delete mandriva (by deleting the partition) would i have to go and fix my master boot record afterward? and i dont think mandriva can write to NTFS. but it should be fine reading my data from D and E right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 X is a bit small, I would have allocated at least 10GB to this so that you can configure about 512MB as swap, and the rest for Mandriva as the "/" partition. Linux can read NTFS, but cannot write, or at least with only limited support at present. If you do remove Linux afterwards, yes, you do need to fix the MBR. This can be done booting the Mandriva CD and fixing the Windows MBR, or using the Windows XP CD to boot and repair it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
praveenmarkandu Posted July 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 (edited) okay. i took a leap of faith by installing mandriva on the X drive. i know its small but i just wanted to see everything would work before i start to make my final transition.(hopefully switch fully to mandriva) when i get to the LILO boot screen i have 4 options: Linux, linux-nonfb, failsafe and windows linux: screen goes blank and i can hear my system fan go crazy so i know its processing something and something is going on in the background but i cant see it linux-nonfb & failsafe : tells me ..................................................BIOS data check successful Uncompressing linux.......OK, booting the kernel it then just stalls at that. i cant press CTRL+ALT+F1 like you said cause i dont think anything has even loaded yet windows: gives me what im using now. thank god for dual boot :) thanks for your fast replies ianw1974. i really appreciate your help Edited July 11, 2006 by praveenmarkandu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 OK, try pressing ESC when you see the screen with the four entries, and then type: linux noapic and see if that gets you further. If not, you can then add some other parameters one-by-one and see if it gets you running. The parameters: nolapic acpi=off and post back if you get up and running with these. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
praveenmarkandu Posted July 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 (edited) linux noapic worked. it started to boot the kernel and load a bunch of stuff but in the end it went to a blank screen. so i pressed CTRL+ALT+F1. which i think brougght up X however when i tried to load the rpm it gave me 3 errors: error: failed dependencies:libexpat.so.1 is needed by fglrx_4_3_0-8.26.18-1.i386.rpm libstdc++.so.5 is needed by fglrx_4_3_0-8.26.18-1.i386.rpm libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2) is needed by fglrx_4_3_0-8.26.18-1.i386.rpm so i ran mcc like you said which launched XFDrake. this is what i chose graphics card:XORG/Vesamonitor: Flat Panel 1280x800 resolution: 1024x768 24pp this configuration works with the Test using 1280x800 res doesnt work :( however, next time i reboot and choose linux noapic it loads mandriva fine and i can use and see the GUI ( at 1024x768 res unfortunately). new questions. how do i automate "linux noapic" and how come my driver from ATI's website doesnt work ? where can i get one that works cause looking at a 4:3 resolution on a widescreen sucks. thank you. *edit: also tried to load the rpm in mandriva GUI. didnt work for what its worth* Edited July 11, 2006 by praveenmarkandu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 OK, go into System/Configuration/Configure Your Computer/Boot/Boot Loader. In here you can then enable the option to disable apic. Then it will automatically remember this for each time you boot. Maybe an easier way to do the ati drivers is: urpmi dkms-ati however, visit the easyurpmi link at the top of this page first, and add sources for main, contrib, updates, plf-free and plf-nonfree. Otherwise, you'll not be able to use dkms and ati. This injects the module into the kernel on startup, and you should hopefully find your system will work after this. You will of course need to run mcc, and configure the display and choose an ATI driver instead of VESA to get it to work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 Oh no! A window's screenshot! I'm blind! Bliiiiiiinnnnnnddddd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
praveenmarkandu Posted July 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 ianw1974 YOU ARE THE MAN!!! helped me single handedly. everything is all good now. got my resolution fixed and even my wireless :). when firefox is loaded up its a bit slow... but then again firefox has a big footprint and i have a tiny swap partition so im going to download GPart and resize all my partitions to make space for 10GB just for mandriva. on my laptop i have an orange button lit by an LED ( to signify if its on or not) doesnt work in mandriva :( and sometimes the wireless just dies. in mandriva 2006 it ask for firmware 2.3 for my ipw2200. would i get better results with the new 3.0? thanks for all your help dude Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 Unsure on the wireless side, but once you're up and running with the 10GB drive, apply all updates - just have a nice fast connection ready for it :P And for extra software, visit the easyurpmi link at the top of this page, and set up all your repositories. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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