No Display for Mint 7 on my inspiron 1100

[caseylinux]

Hello,
I have an old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It had Windows XP a while ago. I tried several different Linux distros in the past, Suse, Ubuntu, PCLinux. PCLinux worked fine, but the others could never run the display. I tried Mint 5 and it works very well. I had to do some tinkering when I first installed it, but it at least would give me a low res generic display to start with. I tried upgrading to Mint 6 and had catastrophic failure. I completely lost everything and had to start with a fresh install of Mint 5. I've been running happily along with 5, but would like to try Mint 7. I just downloaded it today and am incredibly disappointed to see that it seems to be having the same problem Mint 6 had (along with all the others).
I tried running the LiveCD in Compatibility mode and there was still no display. I don't get a cursor or anything. Sometimes it will play the login sounds, but often it won't.
I have upgraded my bios to A32 and, after reading through some other posts on this forum, increased my video ram allocation to 8mb instead of the standard 1, still with no effect.
I tried the LiveCD on my desktop and it worked beautifully.
The CD will boot on my Inspiron 1100, I can choose what option I want (install directly, run the standard LiveCD, Compatibility mode, etc) and it either hangs somewhere in the boot up or it simply fails to run the graphic display.
I am going to try to skip the LiveCD and just install it to see if it's a problem with running it from the CD but I have my doubts.
Any ideas as to what the problem might be and, ideally, how to fix it?

[Husse]

As you have a working Linux on your laptop run lspci (note l is a lower case L) and post here
There is a problem with Intel graphics in Gloria but it should not stop you from a successful boot

[caseylinux]

Ok, thanks for taking a look at this. Here's what I get when I run lspci in the terminal in Mint 5.

~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller

[Husse]

I have found some problems with Brookdale
I'll add this to my "unsolved list" and come back to you when I have more time

[anthrax]

My brother had the same problem on SIS graphics card. When you have blank screen and you know that system has started (you hear the sound) try pressing CTRL+ALT+Backspace. X server will restart. That helped in his case and the problem never occured again.

[Husse]

Perhaps this is the solution
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=24768
Also search for 82845G in the forum - there are quite a few posts

[caseylinux]

Thanks for your efforts Husse and others. Unfortunately, before I ever posted my own problem I had already done exhaustive searches on this forum and others for solutions to the blasted 82845G chipset and linux compatibility issue(s). I am still very happy to be running Elyssa and I guess I will simply continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Just to give an update, I did have some success with Mint 6 in XFCE community version. Not enough to run it full time, but perhaps when the community XFCE for Mint 7 comes out I'll give it another go.