Mandriva freezes at login

[MichaelD]

Hi

I don't know what's causing this, but I've installed Mandriva twice today and I get the same problem each time. The whole thing freezes at the login screen and I can only hit the power button.

I've never had problems with any other distros or older versions of Mandrake, even the new live cd runs ok.

At first I wasn't sure if the problem was my PS2 mouse as the pointer was stuck there.

Then I thought it might have been the way my partitions are set up.

I have the following:

20 GB Windows XP Pro NTFS (Primary partition) > 10 GB Mandriva Ext3 > 30 GB FAT32 for files (both on an extended partition).

Anyone got any ideas as to what could be causing it to freeze up like this?

My system isn't exactly the best, but as I said, I've run various distros on here with no problems in the past.

Pentium III 633Mhz
256MB RAM
60GB HD
Onboard graphics
Soundblaster Live 5.1

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[fingal]

This is probably either a kernel problem or some sort of hardware conflict - I'd be guessing, but it might be your onboard graphics

[greenpenguin]

What sort of on board graphics + what version do you have?

[MichaelD]

I don't know about the graphics as it's built into the motherboard and the version I was installing was Mandriva 10.1.

I managed to install Redhat 9 ok afterwards and that didn't freeze.

Maybe my poor pc isn't good enough to run the latest Mandriva which is a shame cos I love the look of it. lol

[fingal]

You might consider using Slackware on your older machine. It has good support for older machines (I'm told - I've used it a little and was very impressed). Not that Slackware is always problem free, but it's very solid.

Knoppix is another alternative. It's quite light, and has very good hardware support. Not sure what the latest version is, but you can install it to your hard drive, and then you have a nice Debian distro, which you can expand using apt-get.

Just a couple of ideas for you. You could probably get an idea about your onboard graphics - assuming you are in some sort of Linux environment - by looking at your dmesg. This is in /var/log. You could just go (in a console) more /var/log/dmesg and see all your kernel boot-time output. It's a boring read! Or you could output it to a text file: cd /var/log/ then dmesg > boring_file.txt

I hope this helps a little

[MichaelD]

I'm not sure now that it is a graphics problem. I can login by tabbing around the various fields and entering username and password etc, KDE loads up and I can open folders by tabbing to them and hitting enter. It's just my mouse that doesn't work.

The mouse is a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. I do have a standard USB mouse that came with the PC, but plugging it in makes no difference either. I don't know now whether to try reinstalling and selecting a different mouse driver or what to do.

[MichaelD]

Weird....

I installed Mandrake 10 and the mouse is working ok. It's just not working with 10.1.

Thanks to everyone who replied.