Boot kills the video

[Philip C Mendelsohn <mend0070@tc.umn.edu>]

Hi,

I hope this is the right place for this question.  I've gotten nowhere
with it elsewhere.


I want to put Debian on an old 486 we gae my son for Christmas.  When
booting with the resc1440.bin image that comes with the Slink distro, the
boot gets as far as the line 'Loading root.bin ...' and the display goes
blank.  I believe the kernel loads, but there's no way to see.

This box uses the S3 86C801/86C805 VGA chipset, which I thought was just
about the most standard thing under the sun.

I have tried the boot params 'vga=ask', 'vga=normal', and 'vga=extended.'
I have played with the BIOS parameters for shadow RAM and video modes.

The trouble is that the box loads tomsrtbt Linux v1.7.185, and also
Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 (from the text mode install disks,) so I know that
it's possible to run on it.  RedHat 5.2 and Mandrake 7.0 also exhibit the
same problem with their bootdisks as Debian.

Sorry for trying the other distros(!), but I'd really like to get this box
running Debian so that I can be consistent across the network at home.

Thanks,

Phil Mendelsohn

-- 
Life is complex:
It has real and imaginary components.
                     --Unknown