CentOS - Oct 2005 - CentOS-4.1 (Final) on Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop

Hi,

I have been using CenOS-4.1 quite sometime now on this laptop. Under 
CentOS I am having a problem during boots (soft or hard boots) that I 
never had with any other Linux distros including Fedora 4. 

I have to reboot the laptop twice as the first boot returns blank screen 
and hangs when it attempts to bring up login screen.  I tested this a 
few times, there is no disk activity or any sign of OS activity..  In 
the end I switch the laptop off and start again.. It works fine 
perfectly in the second boot.

Not sure what happens in the first boot (though all startup processes 
return OK till it gets hung)
How can I diagnose this problem..?   Is this a known problem..?  Is 
there any workarounds..etc ?

Thanks,
Turker

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On 10/17/05, Turker Dundar <turker at cremis.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been using CenOS-4.1 quite sometime now on this laptop. Under
> CentOS I am having a problem during boots (soft or hard boots) that I
> never had with any other Linux distros including Fedora 4.
>
> I have to reboot the laptop twice as the first boot returns blank screen
> and hangs when it attempts to bring up login screen.  I tested this a
> few times, there is no disk activity or any sign of OS activity..  In
> the end I switch the laptop off and start again.. It works fine
> perfectly in the second boot.
>
> Not sure what happens in the first boot (though all startup processes
> return OK till it gets hung)
> How can I diagnose this problem..?   Is this a known problem..?  Is
> there any workarounds..etc ?
Got the same laptop here.
Turn off smartd, update your bios, and it should work fine. It's one
of the better supported laptops for linux, although you might find
that your screen is a little blurry in X, as it likes to use 1600x1200
instead of the 1920x1200 it's capable of. The other thing you can do
is to remove the "rhgb quiet" from grub.conf. It's not 100%
necessary,
but it helps for things like updating kernels & x when you use
nvidia's drivers.


--
Jim Perrin
System Administrator - UIT
Ft Gordon & US Army Signal Center