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On 19/12/12 14:23, George Parker wrote: > I reckon this is related to Tom's recent tales of woe. I've just > cured an intermittent fault on a desktop PC by putting in a new > motherboard and processor, an AMD A4-3400 which has integrated Radeon > graphics. I stuck in the latest Mint release and booted and blow me, > no display after boot. Mint does not have a nice screen to look at > during boot, blank by design, and as soon as the first few lines of > text disappear, the monitor loses sync and the little green light goes > out, never to re-appear. > > I tried with several different versions of mint all with the same > result. This was with an old AG Neovo monitor so I tried a modern LG > monitor, same result. I tried using the failsafe install version but > all I got was "initramfs: unable to find a medium containing a file > system" from several different distros. > > Many boots later I found that PCLinuxOS, Puppy Slacko, Debian, Mepis > 8.5 and 3 versions of Ubuntu would boot with a display. No Mint > version or open Suse will boot with a display. I installed Debian but > it wouldn't install grub or lilo for some reason so i now have Kubuntu > installed. But I much prefer Mint. Anybody know any boot tweaks to > put into a bog standard VGA mode, perhaps? > > BTW, the main reason I don't use Debian is that I can never find > reliable repositories for their software. > > George > See my previous email to Tom with the various steps you can use to solve this problem - *everything* you need to know is already in there. Are you booting and installing from USB media? There is what I consider to be a bug in the Debian installer where if you boot from USB the installer sometimes designates the thumbdrive as /dev/sda and your destination drive as /dev/sdb. When grub-install is called it's hard-coded to attempt to install to (hd0) in grub terms, which is actually the USB installer, and will fail. This is highly annoying, and difficult to fix from the installer itself. Booting from CD will sidestep this, or you can crash the installer out, boot from a live media and chroot in and then install grub (which is a major pain in the ass, but trivial enough). Access the grub boot menu by holding left shift, and use the edit mode to modify your kernel stanza - remove the "quiet" and "splash" options, and then boot - this will get rid of the hateful, information-free blank boot screen from modern distros and give you the good old fashioned scrolling boot messages you can use to diagnose your problems. A better option is to boot in recovery mode, remount / read-write and then fix whatever you need to (again, this is ALL in my previous email to Tom). As for the various posters talking about Debian repository failures, well, my mind boggles. Apparently you live in a different universe to me. Debian has by far the best, most heavily distributed repository system of any Linux distro in existence. If you don't pick stupid mirrors in the first place, you will never have a problem. As someone pointed out, there are automated tools to find you the best/fastest mirrors, you can do round-robin or just set to the German mirror (which is indeed very fast). I personally just use the default UK mirrors and never have a problem. As in, installing Debian on at least 10 different architectures, 1000's of times over the last 20 years without a single issue. I promise you, if you are having problems with the Debian repos the fault is entirely your own... Lastly, it's probably worth checking that you have installed flgrx right? You are going to need that badly for your very modern AMD graphics hardware. The reason you're getting a blank monitor mostly is because the default Xorg drivers are going to be the free ones, which aren't supporting your kit. You either need to install fglrx in the first place, or update it to a brand new version if it is installed. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq