OK, a little while ago I got hold of an old Micron P200. Actually looks like mostly ISA stuff, inside, though there is an integrated IDE controller and PCI video.

I plugged it into my KVM, booted up and waited to see what happened. I got GRUB with a 2.4 Linux as the primary and DOS as the second choice. I kind of just wanted to see what would happen so I let it boot up Linux, and right after it got to the login console (text mode), the text got very dark, and the screen would intermittantly go blank. It was a periodic type of thing, it would be very dark for .25 seconds, and then blank for .75. These are just guesses of course.

I didn't have the root password for that install anyway, so I wiped it and installed a fresh copy of Redhat 7.3, which was what I had on hand. The install went very well, it looked like it was booting normally, I configured my network and sound, it continued to boot, all fine until it finished booting and got to the console, and the same thing happened with the dark, pulsing text. An interesting piece of information is that I can only type to the console while the text is on the screen.

I can SSH in fine, and as far as I can tell, everything is normal. I really would like to be able to login from the console, start x, etc. I have been unable to describe this problem in short enough terms for google, so I hope you can help.

Mike

It sounds like it's trying to start X. I had the same behavior when I mucked up my video card driver and settings. When you ssh into it type "ps aux" and look for anything running like xdm or gdm or kdm or X. then kill that process.

Yeah, if you actually are trying to get a graphical desktop, I would quit while you are ahead. I run P-133 and 166 machines as my firewall and fileserver, and I would not dream of going graphical. Maybe back in the old days, with FVWM or TWM, and only with an old version of X.

Use the little bugger as a command line machine, and enjoy the power!