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AR15.COM
11/13/2010 12:15:55 PM EDT
Have an issue with a particular computer using many linux distributions to include the recent versions of Linux Mint.

The computer is a Mini-ITX board based small form factor computer.  This one uses an Intel chipset for most functions including video.

The problem is the video goes to some wacky unusable state at some point in the boot sequence.  So apparently it's loading some kind of video driver or changing to a video mode that either the video chips or monitor can't handle.

Tried the Mint 10 distro that just came out and it has a new wacky video state... I get a stable display, but the image is compressed into the top left 1/4 of the screen.  I've tried a start up command ("set vga=xxx") to try to force a suitable video resolution and refresh rate but it didn't have any effect.  During the early part of boot up and later part of the shutdown sequence the display looks normal.

Trying to see if it will work for me with my mobile internet and other stuff at that location, so trying to test from the live CD before installing.
11/16/2010 4:58:47 PM EDT
[#1]
Have tried the Hardware Driver application in the Mint menu to see if there is any other drivers that you could try?

11/16/2010 6:18:30 PM EDT
[#2]
Thanks for the reply.

As best I could tell I think it said there were no third party drivers available.  It's hard to see what I'm doing with everything so small on the screen.

Linux is great when it works (which is most often) but when it doesn't I'm pretty clueless at how to fix it.  This particular computer hasn't been able to run Mint 9 or 10, IIRC 8 ran ok but didn't support my mobile internet service.
11/16/2010 6:34:54 PM EDT
[#3]
Have you had any Linux distros work on that machine?

I had some issues with one of my machines that has  NVIDIA onboard video. It didn't like whatever the OS was wanting to use and I had to install the older third party driver. It still didn't like many distros though and it only runs Puppy well.
11/16/2010 6:36:43 PM EDT
[#4]
Quoted:
Have you had any Linux distros work on that machine?

I had some issues with one of my machines that has  NVIDIA onboard video. It didn't like whatever the OS was wanting to use and I had to install the older third party driver. It still didn't like many distros though and it only runs Puppy well.

Yes I have a version of PC Linux OS on there right now which works fine but doesn't support the ISP... had run some older versions of Ubuntu on there as well.

As a guess I think part of the problem is that the mini-itx boards often use laptop chipsets but it's being used with a regular VGA monitor.  I've just never seen anything like this 1/4 screen size thing.
11/17/2010 5:50:33 PM EDT
[#5]
Use lspci to find the video chipset info, then look for bugs filed against it with whatever distribution you are trying.



Intel chipsets are generally well supported.