I have installed mandrake 7.2 on my win 98 machine that has 64mb of mem, 2.5 Gb HDD, s3 virge dx graphics, creative sound card and a motherboard based on an intel chipset which is about 2 or 3 years old I think its a vtech or something. Anyway to get to the point I install linux to my D: extended partition (I also have a swap partition of 64mb) and it installs ok but when I reboot it goes through the usual post testing which is fine and then gives me the grub loader on which I choose linux. The login screen then shows up and just as I about to login the monitor screen goes blank but the monitor led stays on and I can't do a flippin' thing. I can load linux in failsafe mode and it's fine. I was thinking maybe it's the display adapter. Anybody got any ideas? Thanks in advance. My system setup is as follows: c: 800mb win 98(se) hda1 d: 1.5mb ext2 linux mandrake 7.2 hda5 e: 64mb swap ex2 linux

Bootup in runlevel 4 (you can edit you /etc/inittab to change the default bootup runlevel) and login at the console. Type startx and see if you can get to your desktop fine that way. If not, it is most likely your dislay adapter /RamDAC / ClockChip, all of which MUST be correct for you linux X desktop to work. You can reconfigure everything by logging in as root and running xf86config at the console

*Bootup in runlevel 4 (you can edit you /etc/inittab to change the default bootup runlevel)* Errm.. sorry for being a bit slow here but how do I edit the /etc/inittab? Do I run in failsafe mode and open a terminal window?

I think your monitor is going blank because the machine is switching over xdm (the X11 session manager) and your X11 setup isn't right. Press CTRL-ALT-F1 and see if you can switch back to the first virtual console. If that works and you get a tty login prompt then your X11 setup is definitely wrong so you'll need to go thru the tty-based X11 setup. I think X11 writes a log file somewhere in /var/log that you might want to check. Good luck. Mark