Hey,
I have two bits of info that suggest this is more of a
RedHat problem than a Linux problem:
1) A high school friend had exactly this problem
(screen when blank when booting up) on a computer
running RedHat 9. (A different monitor had been used
to install RedHat 9, and that monitor worked OK.
Later, my high school friend got a different monitor,
which went blank on boot up.) I solved the problem
for my friend by swapping his nVIDIA card for a Voodoo
Banshee. (And then I upgraded him to CentOS-3.)
2) I tried doing a Debian X desktop install on my test
bench system with the nVIDIA TNT2 card plugged in.
Debian's X install is more manual (less automatic)
than under CentOS. I had to tell it which driver to
use ("nv"), which I found by looking it up via Google.
Debian could not get X to load -- after the screen
flashed several times, Debian gave up and dumped me
onto a text prompt with some messages on the screen.
Maybe it is fair to say that it is a Linux problem,
which RedHat 9 and its descendants do not handle well.
Rick