Linux – Yggdrasil: Oldest Linux Distribution in CD

If you are willing to take the challenge, Gentoo can be your friend in the situations where you need to do something the casual distros won't do. Just compile the kernel with OSS enabled, put oss in USE flags and programs will get compiled with the OSS support enabled.

Assuming it's just XServer Failing

Try this first, after a minute of that - hit Ctrl+Alt+F2.

That might drop you to a TTY screen where you can login text-based and do the updates/installs there.

Assuming it is the Graphics

(which would surprise me, normally if that's the case it dumps you into TTY)

Boot into a liveCD (whatever you installed from might be the best). Make a place to mount the partition of your linux device and then you can chroot in and install the graphics you need to test if that is the issue. Chroot should be installed by default on most liveCDs.

1) Boot into the liveCD (should put you in as root).

2) Make a mount point you know of for your local disk

mkdir /mnt/brokenlinux

3) Find the partition of your linux drive (outputs all drives and their partition info)

fdisk -l

4) Mount the linux installed partition to the mount point you created

mount /dev/sda# /mnt/brokenlinux

5) Chroot in and then do the updates and such.

chroot /mnt/brokenlinux

I don't know which linux you're on, so I can't tell you what to update. I know arch is pacman -Syy && pacman -Syu, debian based is apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.

Make sure your graphics card is recognized and then find which drivers you'll need.

lspci | grep VGA

Maybe it's actually GRUB not seeing the right partition

If you know the partition, during boot at grub, hit "e" for edit and check that it's looking at the right partition.

I don't recall 100% (I use syslinux), but I think it looks like (hd0,#). If you try that and it fails, nothing is saved so rebooting will revert to default.

If that is the issue, however, when you get into linux just edit /boot/grub/grub.conf with the correct #.