Linspire not recognising video card

Q I'm having a problem with the Linspire 5.0 Live distro. I can run it as a Live CD with no problem, but when I try to install it by typing startx at the prompt the cursor appears and the screen turns grey - then it just stops. I'm not sure what to do to get it to work. Any help would be appreciated. My hardware specs are: Pentium 4 3.00 GHz, 512MB DDR2 RAM, 200GB ATA hard drive, ABIT AA8 DuraMAX motherboard, ATI PCIE Radeon vGuru series RX600 graphics card.

Linspire has a voiced tutorial on how to run Linux - but not how to install it!

A It sounds as if Linspire doesn't like your video card. It might not have recognised it correctly, or even support it. As you have a high-end and fairly new Radeon chipset, the chances are that Linspire doesn't even know what it is. Video card drivers for X are updated frequently but many distributions are a few revisions behind and some are a long while overdue for an update. You may want to try another Linux distribution, such as SUSE (which lists your card as fully supported in version 9.2 and 9.3), Fedora or Mandriva, just to see what they do with the card. These distros tend to be updated a little more frequently than Linspire, plus they have more community support to get updates in the mix early. Linspire may also have updates available, but you're kind of stuck if it won't even start a graphical desktop.

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