No video during boot

[rob15]

I have video after I ssh in and give the init 5 command, then video is there, otherwise, no video.

I have a RH 8 and RH 7.3, linux drivers in the SIS RH 7.3 box

I have latest Nvidia drivers on a GF3 ti on the RH 8 box.

Anyone have any ideas on this?

Much thanks-

Rob

[bwkaz]

Um... what?

What are you trying to do?

Is the problem that your installation of Linux doesn't boot to a graphical login? If you log in normally at the text-mode login, you can then startx to get X running. If you insist on having a GUI login (which isn't a terribly great idea if something ever goes wrong...), you can change the default runlevel in the /etc/inittab file -- there should be documentation in there on what to set it to to get different things to happen.

[rob15]

No no, see, I have NO video until I issue the init 5 command - nothing, no text during boot up at all, just a dark screen. This occurs on both computers, not just one.

There are no bios beep errors, nothing, the machines boot up just fine, except the screen is blank in both cases. once X is initialized, I have video.

Does that make more sense?


Rob
:-)

[bwkaz]

Oh, OK, yeah.

Do you use lilo or grub to boot? If lilo, check in /etc/lilo.conf to see if your Linux entry has a "vga=<something>" entry in it. If so, change it to "vga=none" to disable a framebuffer console, and see if that helps. Rerun /sbin/lilo after you change the config file.

If you use grub, then I think the config file is /etc/grub/menu.lst, but I could be wrong. Anyway, figure out which config file it uses, check for the same "vga=<something>" in there, and change it to "vga=none". You don't have to rerun grub after you change its configuration.

If this helps, then what were the lines originally? It could be that you're using a framebuffer mode that either the card or the monitor doesn't work with...

You could also try "vga=ask", and you should be able to select which mode to use. But I've never seen that in action, so I don't know if that menu is only validated modes, or just anything that the kernel thinks it can do. It might be worth a shot anyway.