jontn_swift

Awwwright. This is getting frustrating. Problem: ATI Radeon 9000. I built the box: Asus MB A7N8X Deluxe 1 GB Crucial DDR PC2100 Athlon 2600+ etc.... When I install RH9 or Fedora core 1, the install goes fine, but if I either add a second monitor, or install with the second monitor on, the best I can seem to get is clone mode, Big Desktop doesn't work. The same is true whether I use the RH supplied radeon driver, or the ATI supplied fglrx driver. OK, so I tried Mandrake 9.1. The screen goes blank in second stage install. Same thing happens with Suse 8.2. Tried downloading Mdk 9.2 from the raw tree (they are holding up releasing 9.2 iso images while they fix a bug related to hardware I don't have) and the install program seems to work fine until it starts installing packages (from local hard disk), then it seems they all fail (with a very un-linux like error message ... "There was a problem installing package foo" ... and cancel or continue anyway buttons.) After a few failures of very core packages, it was painfully obvious the install wasn't going to be successful. I suppose I could try a network install. Grrrrrr. Anyone used Mdk 9.2 with a Radeon 9000 and two monitors in Big Desktop Mode? or dual server mode? or any distribution for that matter? Did you have the card in when installing Linux, or did you have Linux already installed and then put in the card?

I sincerely doubt that it is the 1 GB memory. I have Fedora running on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe with 1 GB RAM, with no problems (other than not being able to get the big desktop with two monitors). I have heard rumblings about problems with SATA however, and I have that disabled on my motherboard. You can do that in your bios, but not having your Windoze drive available would, I expect, be something of a bother. I found a thread over on linuxquestions dot org regarding SATA problems with Linux. The support for SATA is in the 2.6 test kernel and will be in the 2.6 full release obviously. But Dual Booting becomes problematic if your Linux distro doesn't support the HD your Windoze is on. I wish I had a good answer for you. The only thing I can suggest is dsabling SATA support in the bios, then re-install on your IDE disk and see if it works. Unfortunately that leaves you with a machine that is not truely dual boot unless you want to use changing bios settings as your boot-loader. (Ugly!) Oh, and removing half your RAM is no longer a problem. Since we went from Simms to Dimms, they no longer need to be matched pairs. I just don't think it will help.