[NTLUG:Discuss] Test machine help

[terry]

On 3/16/07, Stan Gatchel <sgatchel at psltech.com> wrote:
> I am on the prowl for a new distro. No more reading reviews. That led me
> to SuSE 10.1 which was not good. Now, I want to try them first (live
> CD's). I have an older machine purchased in 2001 which I thought would
> ok for this. So I bought a bunch of Live CD's to try. When I booted

Which live CD's did you try?


> them, they all gave me distorted graphics (narrow band of diagonals) on
> the screen or other messages (like graphics card not recognized). I

You could be a bit more specific - would give us more to go on...
       (Particularly about the error messages.)

> suspect the old ATI rage graphics card. Below are the spec's for the
> machine. Maybe an old Matrox card would do better?
> Here is the disto list:
>
> Sabayon 3.1
> Elive 0.5
> Freespire 1.0
> SimplyMEPIS 6.0
> Kubuntu 6.10
> Mandriva One 2007
> PCLinuxOS 0.39a
>

You did not try Slax?

You did not try Ubuntu?

You did not try Knoppix?

Do you have a DVD drive?
If so:  http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/16/1724219

> Here are the machine specs
>
> Hardware        Brand   Bus     Comments
> CPU     AMD Athlon (i386)
>
> Disk    WD400BB-53CAA0  IDE
> Disk    WD200BB-00AUA1  IDE
> CD-RW   PlexWriter (PX-W1610A)  IDE
> CD-ROM  N/A
>
> Display         ATI Rage Fury Pro/ Xpert 2000 Pro (128)         PCI     Card type AGP --
> Northbridge adapter?
> Floppy  Yes
>
> Memory  250 MB
>
> Modem   Agere V.90 56K Winmodem
>
> Net Card        Dlink 10/100
>
> USB     2 ports (USB 1.1)
>
> Sound   ASUSTek Deluxe motherboard (RealTek ALC850 codec)
>


What monitor are you using?

>
>
>
> Any ideas?

Don't know for sure, but you might need to pass framebuffer
instructions to the kernel at boot time, something like:
vga=0x317


>
> Thanks,
>
> Stan
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>


-- 
Ubuntu is an African word that means, "Slackware is too hard for me".
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