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Inspiron 640m [solved]


Guest greenmaze
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Guest greenmaze

I'm a windows person who hopes to one day be a linux person. Right now I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I installed Mandriva 2006 on my new laptop, but I get no GUI after the install completes and reboots. I figure it has something to do with the video drivers, but I really have no idea how to fix it.

 

I downloaded Linux video drivers from the Intel website, which came in the form of a tar.gz. I tried following the directions (tar –zxvf Intel-3.4.3006-20051209.i386.tar.gz), but all that appeared to do is extract the files to the hard drive. What do I do with the files now that their on my hard drive?

 

Thanks for any help.

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Hi and welcome to the board :beer:

 

OK, first things first, what video card do you have in your machine? You shouldn't need the intel drivers, for a start their old :P

 

The ones with Mandriva 2006 should work perfectly fine, and I think the reason it's not working is because when you install, at the summary screen you need to configure your graphics card. A few options, or at least one would have been marked in red to show it's not configured.

 

I would suggest redoing the install again from scratch, and then when you get to the summary screen, make sure all is configured. I have two machines with Intel cards, my Toshiba laptop using an Intel 82852/82855 and I have a desktop with an 82865G. Both work perfectly fine, providing that you configure them during installation.

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Guest greenmaze

Thanks for the response. I was actually able to get the video working after lowering the screen resolution.

 

My problem now is the wireless network card. I've tried using the windows drivers, but I get an error "Unable to find the ndiswrapper interface!". I updated all the software on the computer, did the URPMI thing, and ran the following three commands:

 

urpmi kernel-source-2.6

urpmi kernel-2.6.12.22mdk

urpmi --auto-select --no-verify-rpm

 

I read somewhere that the drivers for my wireless NIC were in the latest update, but I was unable to find them after doing those updates.

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I was actually able to get the video working after lowering the screen resolution.
I would strongly recommend using the proper resolution for the screen - maybe you can get it to work with a lower resolution but it will annoy you.

I have an Inspiron 510m and it took a little jiggerypokery to get the proper native resolution (1400x1050) due to a BIOS bug. Before I fixed it, it ran at 1280x1024 and looked blurry and uneven - it was much much better after I found the 855resolution patch.

Do you have the 1280x800 version or the 1440x900 version? And have you managed to get the proper resolution working or are you using some other setting?

 

Sorry can't help with the wireless, I remember reading somewhere that ndiswrapper was no longer needed but maybe that's just in the really brand new kernels.

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Do you have ndiswrapper installed?

 

rpm -qa | grep ndiswrapper

 

should report that it is if you have it installed, if not:

 

urpmi ndiswrapper

 

then I suggest following the ndiswrapper wiki installation guide:

 

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawi...hp/Installation

 

you just need to continue from:

 

ndiswrapper -i filename.inf

 

where filename.inf is the windows driver for your card. If this is in an exe, you need to extract it first so that you have the .inf, .sys files, etc.

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