Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux [SOLVED]

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daveinuk
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Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux [SOLVED]

Post by daveinuk »

Hi Folks, tried just about every version of mint on this old laptop and the only thing that boots a live cd decently seems to be puppy, the machines old and really low spec, but it ran xp ok and i don't know what this problem is -

It's only got 256mb of RAM and an Athlon 1500 cpu, It seems to be booting the live cd I made OK, install took a little while but seemed to go without issue, but when I come to boot from the HDD it just hangs on a black screen with a white blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I've left it for up to/over half an hour on the advice of all sorts I've come up with in searches but no dice . . . . . . . I don't get how it can boot great off the cd but not the HDD ! It seems really snappy and responsive and I was only going to keep it as a spare and to save throwing it on the tip, but if I'm stuck on this black screen and don't know how to proceed or even if it's a viable machine? Any ideas please ???
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daveinuk
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Re: Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux

Post by daveinuk »

Bump - as I posted late last night in the u.k, hopefully someone may be around this morning. . . . . . . .
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Re: Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux

Post by roblm »

Did you try LMDE with the Mate desktop? I have two older desktop computers. One has an Athlon XP 1800 CPU, Nvidia
GeForce2 MX 400 GPU and 384 MB RAM. It can only run LMDE, but I've also run Puppy Linux on it. Mint 13 Xfce runs from
the live DVD but either fails to install or I see a black screen after installation. With LMDE, there were some graphical glitches
in the icons in the file manager, but by adding this line:

Option “Accel” “false”

to the Screen section of the xorg.conf file, everything looks fine now.

The other has an Intel Pentium 4 CPU, Nvidia Riva TNT2 GPU and 256 MB RAM. It will run Mint 13 Xfce or LMDE.

I actually have a third older computer that has the same Athlon XP 1500 CPU as you do, a GeForce2 MX 400 GPU and 256 MB RAM,
but it's still running Windows XP and I've never tried to install any Linux distro.
richyrich

Re: Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux

Post by richyrich »

Fellow member Hinto has brought this to my attention. Which may interest you . . :)

An unofficial version of Mint with the LXDE desktop : http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 68#p950051
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Re: Black screen/cursor -sony vaio/puppy linux

Post by daveinuk »

Thanks for the suggestions. . . . . . . I attempted with LMDE/mate and no joy. . . . .. wouldn't boot to a desktop off the dvd but when I was forcing a shutdown I noticed a few error messages but didn't pay that much attention to the content, I've burnt several dvd's with K3B and they always seem to pan out right and i only download torrents, so. . . . . . .

I did a quick D/L of debian LXDE, I figured rather than attempt another mint/buntu I'd have a(nother)bash with a pure debian distro, hindsight here suggests LMDE may have worked after all, as this attempt has me installed with a working desktop after weeks of trying all sorts on and off sporadically ! I actually really like this version, not looked at LXDE for a long while, and it saves another laptop from the waste . . . . . . This is only going in the shed outside for very occasional use, some music and podcasts and odd bouts of browsing when I need to reference or check something, but just saving it and making some use of it makes the effort worthwhile and I've learnt from it so thanks all round, I'll mark me as 'solved' :wink:

Edit: for the record - Version used - LXDE 32 bit

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cur ... esktop.iso
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