Having display issues when trying to install Linux Mint 13 (Maya Cinnamon) on Dell Latitude D600

Question

I am trying to install Linux Mint 13 (Maya/Cinnamon) on an Old Dell Latitude D600. I can boot the live CD, but when I try to install, I can't see the windows that are coming up on screen. I can see the outline of the windows that are popping up asking the install questions, but I can't see anything inside the window. I can see the panel fine at the bottom of the screen, but not the the window contents. Any ideas? - I am a new newbie. Haven't used Linux for more than 30 minutes, so take it easy on me.

Solution

I just installed LM(maya - mate) on the very same laptop. You will likely be disappointed by the performance. Mate is not a 3D-acceleration mandatory DE (unlike cinnamon, which is gnome-shell based) and performance is still horrible. In addition 3rd party video support is vaporous, as in hard to get a hold of. If you REALLY wish to try things out:

You are going to have to be patient. During install my screen went black for nearly 10 minutes. Reminding myself that this laptop has a junky Celeron and only 1.5G of ram (my system) I had to learn a bit of patience myself. You COULD try to boot into "compatibility mode" => press "tab" key when boot screen says "Autoboot in 9... 8... 7..." and install from there. An extreme additional step would be to strictly define your VGA resolution: press "tab" at "autoboot" to view the list of boot options then select "Compatibility mode" and press again (to enter editing mode). Delete the "--" and replace with "vga=785". This will force 640x480 resolution at 16 bit color depth.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions to learn about VESA standards and for more information on where the 785 comes from.

The good new is, once the initial install did it's thing, the system was fully operational with no additional tweaking necessary. Of course, even using the latest ISO, there was still close to a GIG of updates that needed to be downloaded and installed.

It should be noted that the reason I installed LM was because WinXP performance was intolerable. I did a dual boot WinXP-LM(mate) across a 120GB 5400 RPM HDD (60GB each, expertly partitioned) and both OSes run slowly, though LM is a notable improvement.

Comments

[Sencer H.]

KDE is not an effective window manager for old hardware. LXDE or XFCE is much better.