alpinekid wrote in message news:...
> Hi,
> I have a Pentium-s running Linux distribution redhat 8.0.
> The motherboard has both isa and pci slots.
> The isa bus has a network card and a ide/floppy/serial etc card.
>
> The graphic card is a diamond stealth 64dram plugged into the pci bus.
> It is the only card that is pci.
>
> The command line text appears on the display just fine but I can not
> start X. It fails saying it can not find a screen.
>
> After much messing around with XF86Config, moving cards to different
> slots etc
> I notice in the dmesg messages from bootup that I think indicates the
> problem.
> PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.00 entry at 0xfc6e0, last bus=0
> PCI: System does not support PCI
>
>
> What does this mean? The graphic card in plugged into a pci slot and
> I get text on the screen.
>
> I'm at a loss as to what to try next.
>
> Can anyone give me any ideas?
> Al

Since no one else has responded ...

Three pieces of vital info needed:
1) what is the make/model of your motherboard?
2) what is the make/model and revision # of your BIOS
3) What is the exact make/model of your video card

And due to the diminished functioning of my brain cells, remind me of
the particulars of what a pentium-s is. (never mind -- Google
reminded me. Which one, what speed do you have?) How much ram
installed? What is your boot loader? Have you successfully run any
other distro/version of Linux on this box? Windows? Is this a
new/fresh install? No updates applied (there are a bunch for RH8)?

Complete dmesg output (or at least more to give us context) would be
useful as would the output of:
$ cat /proc/pci

Compared to my box, yours is old, indeed. IIRC, some of these earlier
pci mobos and cards could produce flakey results under the right
conditions -- these were the days when MS was still pushing P-N-P as
pci was replacing it. Some card makers took short cuts trying to
support both architectures. And P-N-P never has/did work well with
Linux.

With luck, you may be able to flash a bios upgrade that will help.

hth,
prg
email above disabled