I built a MythTV box aroun a Biostar TForce 6100 motherboard, not knowing that no Linux driver exists for its onboard video. To compensate for that, I purchased a PCI video card, a Geforce MX4000. Whenever I start up with a monitor connected to it, regardless of whether the driver is "nvidia" "nv" or "vesa", I get a completely blank screen between the moment I hit the power or reset button and the moment the Knoppmyth screen with the penguin on the couch comes up--I can't see the computer doing POST, I can't see any of the screens describing what loads at startup--it's all blank. And if I hit ctrl-alt-F2 to go to the console, I get a blank screen too.

In my XF86Config-4, I created the video card as "Card1", closely mirroring the default "Card0" present in the file (changing only the bus ID and the driver name) and adjusted "Screen0" to use the new card, and I can't for the life of me detect any mistakes (I'd post the file here except I'm not really sure how to do so under the circumstances since I don't have a working browser on the machine). Any advice on what I might be able to do to fix this would be greatly appreciated...it's causing a lot of irritation vis-a-vis my attempts to troubleshoot a wonky install.

Check your BIOS. Is it set for PCI, AGP or onboard?

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I thought maybe it was a software/driver issue (the notorious NVidia X bug, perhaps) but a more thorough inspection of my BIOS options fixed it. Boy do I feel dumb.