No Signal to monitor

[birdhouse]

help! ive just installed red hat 9 on my desktop and used grub loader to dual boot but everytime i try to load up linux after it has mounted all filesystems and done its stuff the monitor says there is no signal. I have a geforce fx 5200 m128mb graphics card and a 15" tft monitor both which were picked up when i probed for them during installation. please help as im a newbee
:)

[Satanic Atheist]

I'm guessing a mis-configured X.

Check out /etc/X11/XF86Config or XF86Config-4 (the latter supersedes the former) and see if you've got things like Refresh Rate and Resolution set correctly. Also make sure that your card can handle the colour depth that's been chosen.

Oh, and if you do CTRL+ALT+F1 whilst it says no signal, you can get back to where the bootloader left off before starting X. See if you get a signal there. If so, you've definitely got a misconfigured X config. My monitor never says "No Signal", but instead goes insane on the flashing-light-thing if I try something it doesn't like.

To get to a command prompt, either try CTRL+ALT+F2 or, when you are asked to select what to boot, do CTRL+X and type:

> linux 3

The "linux" here is what appears on the graphical menu when asked what to boot with exactly the same case. If yours says "custom" then you type "custom 3" instead.

To go into X, you can either do:

> init 4

Or:

> startx

But to get back out, I guess you're going to need to reboot and try again unless one of the virtual terminals comes up.

The XF86Config files are fairly self-explanatory inside, but I recommend that you don't play with settings if you don't know what they do.

Good Luck,

James