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To potential close voters: I have looked through My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? but neither nomodeset nor apci=off + nolapic worked.

I am trying to install Lubuntu on an ancient laptop (Pentium III Mobile, 384MB RAM). While I can boot it from the install DVD just fine, after the plymouth boot screen finishes, the display simply goes black. However, I am in fact able to get into tty1 and run commands. I attempted to run sudo service lightdm start, but it said that starting the job failed. I also tried startx, but it segfaulted.

Interestingly, if I do sudo shutdown -h now, the plymouth shutdown screen appears, so it seems to me that this is more of an X server issue than a video driver issue.

Any other boot parameters I can try?

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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1 Answers1

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Well... I figured it out. After I couldn't get Lubuntu to boot properly, I tried Puppy Linux. It came up with a message about pup-xxx.sfs not found. So I tried it on another computer, and it worked just fine. O_o. So I searched that error message on Google, and found a thread where someone said that error can occur if Puppy can't find the install medium. Then I remembered that the laptop in question uses a Firewire DVD drive. On a hunch, I used the PLOP boot manager to boot from a USB drive instead of a DVD, and what do you know? It worked!

TL;DR The Linux kernel didn't like the Firewire DVD drive I guess.

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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