> anything at all, then, after a very long time, I see the stream of Linux text
> messages that indicates booting, but I never see a graphical login screen.
> (The delay before the messages appear is far longer than a normal boot cycle
> -- indeed, I had given up waiting for something to happen and was pondering my
> next move when suddenly the messages started flying by).
This sounds like your BIOS doesn't know how (or try) to use your
graphics card, so all the BIOS output goes to the other display
connector (the one of the built-in graphics adapter). So the BIOS's own
boot messages, the GRUB boot messages, and the early kernel messages all
go "unseen" and it's only once the Linux kernel loads your display
driver (to get a framebuffer) that finally you start seeing output.
> This sounds like perhaps a driver issue of some kind, so what packages
> do I need to be sure are
No, it looks like it's fine on Linux's side. The problem is the earlier
boot environment (the one from which Linux is started).
So the fix will need to be somewhere between your BIOS and your video card.
Maybe all it takes is to tell your BIOS to use your external graphics
card instead of (or additionally to) the built-in video adapter.
Stefan
