I'm trying to get Ubuntu Linux (dapper drake OR Breezy Badger) to boot into the live CD. But unfortunately it won't boot because of my graphics card, it tells me that it failed to start the x server, and that my configuration is wrong and then spews information at me. I'd really like to give these live CD's a whirl... I know that I was able to use vesa drivers iin PClinuxOS and SimplyMepis to get linux to work, but no such luck in Ubuntu I can't seem to get the driver to change...

I use fedora core myself... (core 5 sucks, but core 4 is okay)

Try pressing ctrl-1 (or control-alt-1) (yes, control key and number 1 at the same time) to exit to a console session where you can run the x configurator to setup your graphics card.

Also, linux ought to give you the option of running the x configuration program when x fails to startup correctly, so read what it tells you and if it gives you the choice, tell it no to seeing a dump of the errors, and yes to running the configuration tool.


ME :D

I know the problem, but Ubuntu kind of freaks out when I tell it that I want to run the config, but the dapper drake version is still in alpha so I can't expect more.... PClinuxOS works ok for me. i'm still trying to coax myself into using Linux as installed rather than live CD's...

In general, the live cd's suck.

reinstall windows on a repartitioned drive. Install windows first, then install Linux and configure it as a dual boot setup. That way you can have both.
I recommend debian as it has the most software available. Unbuntu is very high quality but has a lot less software available.

Another alternative is to install cygwin on your windows operating system... That will give you a working linux subsystem on your M$ windows machine. It is a little quirky, but works pretty good overall.

ME :D


I know the problem, but Ubuntu kind of freaks out when I tell it that I want to run the config, but the dapper drake version is still in alpha so I can't expect more.... PClinuxOS works ok for me. i'm still trying to coax myself into using Linux as installed rather than live CD's...

My thing is though, if a live CD isn't working how can I expect the actual installation to work...

Also, I wouldn't have a problem being windows free but I'm worried that I'll lose my computer completely when I ditch windows... so I'm trying out Live CD's.

Also I don't have windows restore disks so whatever I do is permanent including removing Windows. are you saying I should just take the plunge and install?

if you see Ian on the forum grab him
I think he like Linex or what ever is call.

What type of vid card do you have?

ATI radeon x600. This is a known problem with ATI drivers me thinks.

Yeah, radeon drivers kind of suck for linux, especially the newer cards. I've heard of people that got it working but it is no easy task. Better to get an nvidia card, or settle for using vesa drivers.

You can use partition magic to repartition your hard drive WITHOUT reformatting your windows partition. Try creating a ~1GB partition for swap and a ~10GB or more partition for linux. Partition magic can create linux ext3, ext2, and swap partitions, so you can format your drive for linux without even using the cds. Make sure you use ext3 if you plan on setting your computer up for dual-boot, and not ReiserFS. There are drivers out there for windows that allow you read/write access to your linux partition from windows, but they only work with ext2 and ext3. The best driver I've found works great in Windows XP, but not in the 64 bit edition. Partition magic doesn't work in the 64 bit edition either. Really, the 64 bit edition sucks, and I would recommend not using it.

I'm not really planning on dual booting... I might one day, but for now I want to replace windows and get the most out of my computer...

and yeah, I'm fine with Vesa drivers, the problem is I can't get the vesa drivers in the ubuntu live cd to work... not even in the newly released dapper drake... I get the feeling that I'm doing something wrong.

I've had good luck with the native linux drivers on ATI cards. The thing you have to remember is that the support will be better for cards that are a year or two old.

Known "good" cards for me have been ATI 9600 AGP PRO card in a P4 with an Asus motherboard (this kicked butt on 3-d) running Fedora Core 3 , and later Core 4, and the ATI RAGE chipset on a tyan motherboard , dual opteron. running FC5. Amazingly FC5 has broken the driver API and OpenGL support for literally all video cards, so 3-d acceleration simply does not work at all on any card.

ME :D

Try an install and see. Those demo CD's are just dum to begin with. I bet it will work unless you have some wild new card that linux does not yet know how to support. Umbuntu is based on a rather stable version of linux. While it may be more reliable, it might lag in driver support.

Another very stable, reliable version of Linux is Centos. You might give it a try. It also lags in driver support, but it is very stable and reliable *IF* it works with your hardware.

Keep a set of Debin Linux install CD's on hand. Debian will probably work with about anything. Same goes with Fedora Core 4 it works great, but patching it is insane.
Core 5 is new and okay if you don't care about 3-d graphics.

ME :D


I'm not really planning on dual booting... I might one day, but for now I want to replace windows and get the most out of my computer...

and yeah, I'm fine with Vesa drivers, the problem is I can't get the vesa drivers in the ubuntu live cd to work... not even in the newly released dapper drake... I get the feeling that I'm doing something wrong.

I've found that PclinuxOS will boot from Live CD just fine... as for installs, I really don't want to risk my computer... it has my life on it =\

Keep in mind dapper drake is still in beta, so it hasn't got the bugs all worked out yet. The developers still recommend breezy badger for most people. Have you tried that?

Breezy (5.10) worked with vesa drivers on my 9800 pro, right from the live cd. But from what everyone has told me, anything better than about a radeon 9600 requires a lot of work and expertise in order to get working with linux. Anymore I just buy nvidia cards when I'm upgrading, since they are so superior under linux. I've actually gotten some directx games running on linux under cedega, and it wasn't hard at all.

I've never been a fan of ATI's drivers in general. While I think they have improved lately with their windows catalyst series, I've had a lot of driver issues all the way back to the Xpert line of units.

That said, I still don't have my system working with my Radeon x1600 Pro, using the drivers ATI just released (in April 2006). I have yet to play with it in depth, as I've only tried using the driver with both monitors, though.

Yeah I'm running the Simply Mepis live CD right now. I had to use a VESA driver to get it to run correctly but so far so good... wish I could experience how good Ubuntu is supposed to be though...

Have you tried the Ubuntu 5.10 live cd? Dapper is beta, so it's not fully polished.

Yeah, I got the Ubuntu 5.10 CD but it didn't like my system so much. Stupid ATI card.

I'd tell you to edit the xorg.conf file, but it's just a live cd so you can't do that. :\

Yay.. Other Linux users in a ADD forum.. Awesome.. I am a FC5 man.. I have my "desktop" machine running Linux and my laptop running windoze (Have to for school)..

Good to see I am amongst friends.. :D

Yeah the Ubuntu 6.06 CDS include a safe graphics option that suits my needs... although I've found I REALLY like enlightenment as a GUI.. and Elive uses it as a default...

I finally have my ATI Radeon X1600 (512MB) card operating properly under linux. 3D doesn't work, but that's because the driver automatically disables DRI in Xinerama mode, so 3D probably does actually work. 2D works great though. That's with the latest driver proprietary (8.25.18), X.org 6.8.1, and Linux 2.6.17.1 (Slackware 10.1 is the distribution, if anyone cares to know). Last time I tried, my system crashed into the transition into graphics mode, but now, it's smooth sailing.

I do have some wierd artifacts on the screen hovering the cursor in certain places (near the edge), but it's a little annoying at worst.

Yay.. Other Linux users in a ADD forum.. Awesome.. I am a FC5 man.. I have my "desktop" machine running Linux and my laptop running windoze (Have to for school)..

Good to see I am amongst friends.. :DAre you kidding? Linux is an ADDer's best friend. You can tinker with the system all day (just TRY that with Windows!), swap out operating systems, use multiple virtual desktops (my computer has eight), multitask like crazy, and of course tabbed browsers (always dangerous!) and tabbed text editors.

Using Vector Linux 5.8, a Slackware derivative ...

I'm currently running Fedora Core 6. It is much improved over FC5, and the hardware support is really good.

I've been using *nix for a long time. My first linux distribution fit on 3 floppies. I later started using Redhat way back when with RH 3, and I had a FBSD server up and running with FreeBSD 2.2.5 at about that time.

Me :D




Me :D

I have been using and contributing to linux for many many years and have seen this type of problem happen over and over and over.

The one major problem w/ any linux distro (or live cd) is the driver support for modern graphic cards use proprietary drivers that are not open sourced. Several vendors (ati, nvidia) have a habit of not releasing their drivers using a compatible open-source licensing scheme to the distro (GPL, etc). Which means that the distribution will not be able to include it by default. In order to get the system installed and "stood up" ... X.org and XFree86 (the actual programs that run the display) usually have compatible open-source drivers but they are far from being high performance.

What i usually recommend is this. AVOID USING A LIVE-CD. You really cant get a feel for the whole OS if you just play around w/ the default configuration that is supplied to you. Linux is all about personal tweaks and adjustments.

The reality is that disk is cheap (even for laptops). Buy a new drive and dual boot your flavor of the day, tweak the heck out of it until someting breaks. Pick a new distro... repeat!! When you find the flavor you like, reinstall from scratch and have fun!

My personal favorite distro at the moment is Ubuntu/Kbuntu, simply b/c its a more userfriendly derivative of Debian. Fedora is very popular due to redhat's legacy.

My every day machine is a Macbook Pro (Intel) which is basically BSD Unix, and I run Debian Linux in a virtual machine using parallels. All my servers run CentOS Linux or Debian.

If you need any help w/ linux you are welcome to ask me any time.

I run a debian server that I use for whatever I decide to figure out next... currently I'm using it to store every episode of seinfeld on a large albeit near-dead hard drive and stream them on demand... I told my brother and father they could watch on their computers but neither is interested. I only did it to learn how.

I got xgl/beryl working on my Ububtu Edgy Eft, those effects are sick. :)

p.s. For those who never heard of xgl, see it in action @ http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/xgl/

Greets Me.

Linux is a nice system to use, but I found it to require more matinence than windows and less compatable with windows games. I wasn't about to search all over for a linux equivilent so I just went back to windows. Windows Vista is gonna be out soon and I have a pre-order from amazon.com for it ariving February 8 approx...

Linux is a nice system to use, but I found it to require more matinence than windows and less compatable with windows games. I wasn't about to search all over for a linux equivilent so I just went back to windows. Windows Vista is gonna be out soon and I have a pre-order from amazon.com for it ariving February 8 approx...It don't think it really requires more maintenance. Once your system is setup perfectly, you just have to apt-get update and all your programs are updated in one time. (For this you need an apt based distro like Debian or Ubuntu).
I believe that the fact that many programs (also games) aren't availble for linux keeps a lot of users with windows. The most annoying thing about linux for me is that you need a week to set up your system (install drivers, config graphic card,...) and that it's sometimes hard to install/compile a program.
Greets Me.

Linux seems to require a lot of maintenance if you don't understand fully what you're doing... "apt-get update" doesn't seem like maintenance to a sysadmin, but it does to an end user. I've found myself doing dpkg-reconfigure on a lot of programs to change settings, etc, that's certainly maintenance, same as windows but on the command line it can be a lot more intimidating, even for the experienced user.

Plus, people who try linux generally end up tinkering with it, testing its limits, etc, and come off with the impression that life with linux is like life tinkering with linux... not really, it can be quite pleasant, except that it's often harder to find a solution since there aren't always nicely-scripted programs for every task you want.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not a desktop linux user... yet. I like a really snappy, responsive operating system that can launch my programs nearly instantaneously. Linux does that with a nice light environment like IceWM, but then the problem is that KDE has all those tempting apps... so I install KDE and wait for them to open. At least the way windows kinda-sorta has only one WM (there are others like bb4win but they're not really competetive with explorer), and it's generally pretty snappy.