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