Flickering screen and unable to install

[PAUSIMS]

Hi,

First of all I have to apologize for my English, it's not good but I hope you can understand me. I'm absolutely new in Ubuntu, I have several years of experience in Windows and also in Mac but it's the first time I try to install any Linux distribution.

I downloaded the 9.10 from the Ubuntu website (not as torrent, but as direct download) and I burnt the ISO image in a CD. I intruduced the CD in the computer where I want to install Ubuntu and I rebooted it.

Then the Ubuntu install-try menu appeared. I chose "try" and appeared a white ubuntu logo fading in and out, and then some text that was like the boot up of Ubuntu. In that point, the screen starts flickering every second, and when I push the power-off button of my computer it stops flickering and says something like "you pressed power off - please remove the CD and close the tray", and then the computer shuts down.

The same happens when I choose Install. At the point it appears a progress number (0%) of the file system, the screen starts flickering and the progress it seems it stops, or at less it's extremely slow.

My computer it's a bit old but I think that's not the problem. It's a Pentium IV at 3'40Ghz, 1GB of RAM and what seems to have the problem, a Nvidia Quadro 256MB graphics card (I don't know the exact model but if you need it I can find it).

Thanks in advance

[nick_goodfate]

how long do you wait until you press the power button ? give it some time .... the flickering is normal !

[PAUSIMS]

No, it wasn't normal... I waited for a long time.

Anyway, I tried some minutes ago to install it again and I don't know how it didn't flicker and it started the installation assistant. I chose to remove the Windows partition and format it all Ubuntu, and the installation said to "finish succesfully".

Then it said it was going to reboot the system, and I chose OK. When rebooting, the white fading logo of Ubuntu appeared, and then... Something like that (plain white text in a black screen):

Ubuntu 9.10 [name of my computer] tty1

[name of my computer] login:

And this screen flickered really quick, I almost was unable to read it and I couldn't type anything there. Then I rebooted the system manually, and appeared this:

General error mounting filesystems.
A maintentance shell will now be started
CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and re-try
root@[name of my computer]-#

It said something else and then "done".... but it started flickering again and I had to shut it down manually again.

And now, everytime I boot it up appears a screen with small dots like white pixels all over the screen, moving very strange... it seems an error with the graphics card.

Any help would be appreciate

[PAUSIMS]

OK, I figured out what was the problem. My computer seems to overheat while starting up, and the solution it's just to wait some minutes before rebooting again. It seeems slly, doesn't it?

Now I'm involved in another issue with the screen resolution (currently the top is 1024x768 but my monitor is capable of much more), but I found a post here in the forum explaining a possible solution, I'll try it and if it doesn't work I'll answer in the post regarding this topic.

Thanks