Hi Laban,

Can you tell us what version of RedHat you're installing?
What graphics card is in this laptop?

Regards,

Stephen.

posted January 11, 2008

For future reference here is the hardware specs for your laptop.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00033663&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=352418&lang=en

Graphics
Trident CyberBlade 3D Graphics with shared 4 MB Video Memory.
High performance 3D graphics
Maximum internal resolution of up to 800 x 600 x 16M; with external monitor - 1280 x 1024 non interlaced
24-bit color provides up to 16 million brilliant colors, making multimedia applications come to life

Here are a few links
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=71314
http://www.melug.org/~mbilodeau/cp1200x111.html

To be honest I couldn't find much about this specific laptop or video card. Honestly in my earlier days with laptops running Linux I would spend a few days just getting the video card working. Now I only buy Linux certified laptops (or with ATI/Nvidia cards) since I don't care to perform that amount of troubleshooting anymore.

You might what to try ubuntu, they offer Live CDs of their OS so you can test for hardware capability off the bat.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization

Latest stable version (download/burn the Desktop CD specific to your processor architecture)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/feisty/release/


Latest Daily build unstable
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

Sorry I do not have an answer for your specific problem, only possible workarounds.

posted January 11, 2008

Hi Laban,

If you are not tied to Red Hat, I would suggest Mepis; it is a Debian based distro with amazing hardware detection. You can download the Live CD, and run it without installing. You will know in a few minutes if the appropriate video drivers are available for your card.

As an aside, I have installed Mepis on several laptops as well as desktops with no video issues. This with on board video as well as 3D accelerated cards. Give it a try and if it works, you can choose to install (very intuitive installer is included) or not.

Go to the site I have listed and download the RELEASED version of the iso which is SimplyMEPIS-CD_7.0-rel_32.iso.

Burn it to CD and then choose to boot up from CD vs. the hard drive.

Michael

Links:

• http://www.mepis.org

posted January 12, 2008

> Trident CyberBlade 3D Graphics with shared 4 MB Video Memory.

Oh, dear $(GOD), throw it away!

I wrote a BeOS graphics device driver for that piece of chip back in the late 1990's (when "internet appliances" were supposed to be a big hit). It was an utter abomination.

If you're determined to put the machine to good use, you can either use the Trident driver (native support, but possibly flaky) or the VESA driver (less problematic but slower), both of which come with xorg (X Windowing system).

...And switch to Ubuntu :-).

posted January 15, 2008