MEPIS Community Forum

good afternoon to you all

i have an issue with my Dell 1537 laptop running Mepis 11.

The symptoms are similar to what's being described here...:
Corrupted display on laptop with ATI Radeon although my display at times ends up just black as well.

From booting it takes seconds up to two minutes or so before the display becomes unusable, even when I boot into text mode as suggested in the above link.
Any ideas?
If it is driver related how come it also happens when I boot from a live USB stick (Mint 12 in this case)?
Or is the graphics card stuffed?
Or the RAM? Memtest doesn't even get to 5% testing before the display turns black.

At the GRUB boot screen (where you select what to boot) hit the Tab key and type in 'xdrvr=radeon confx' without the quotes. Hit Enter. If this works for you, you can add that Cheatcode to the /boot/grub/menu.lst so it will always boot that way. Of course if you're running from the LiveDVD then you'll need to input it every boot. See here for an explanation: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php?title=Cheatcodes

Once you get it to boot and install then you can use sgfxi to install the ATI proprietary drivers if you need more performance. (The open source radeon driver will get about 70-80 percent of the proprietary driver's performance.)

Once you get it booted you will have the User's Manual (icon on your Desktop) for even more information.