A long, strange FC3 problem (fwd)

[Jonathan Berry]

Hi Summer,

On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 13:39:11 -0700 (MST), Summer Brooks
<brooksj at wildhorse.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jonathan...
> 
> here's a message that contains the original email I'd sent to the
> list a couple days ago, that no one initially responded to until
> after I'd thrown in my 2 cents on someone else's question about
> whether or not to upgrade from FC2 to FC3.

Yes, I saw your previous emails.

> It contains all the painful details, and I'd already removed the
> rhgb in between the original and this response, and added the nofb
> option once I read this response... and i still have to unplug
> the monitor and plug it back in when it switches from boot messages
> to login panel, just to be able to login, and suffer through
> lockups while either interacting on a webpage form (ie, blog
> interface or Yahoo mail), or watch it freeze up while in screensave.
> Disabling the screensaver makes the intervals betwen lockups
> longer.
>
> if you seen any other familiar sypmtoms in that long message,
> let me know.
> 
> i hadn't tried getting drivers directly from nVidia; if I can
> get my machine to stay up long enough, i'll point my browser that
> way and see.  but wouldn't the Fedora folks use what nVidia
> provides, or have they built their own?

Sorry, but no.  nVidia's drivers are not open source, and so do not
qualify for inclusion with Fedora Core.  Also, nVidia doesn't allow
distros to distribute their drives for some reason (I heard recently
that this might have changed, but Fedora still will not include them
for the previous reason).  What is included is the open-source "nv"
driver which is not 3D accelerated.  What would be good is to download
the drivers (get the 6111 from the archive along with the 6629 that is
current, I'd use 6111 for FC2 and 6629 for FC3) from another computer,
and boot to runlevel 3 to install them (from a flash drive or CD or
something).

> But the lockup whle using Disk Druid in the FC2 install was
> impressive... and no way I can change the driver for that.

Yeah, that is not good.  You obviously did not have any trouble with
FC3, though.  And there is always the text install if it is X causing
the problem.

> I just hope that, despite appearances, my monitor isn't the
> item that Fedora doesn't play nice with.  I like my 19" LCD,
> and no way I'm buying a new monitor just to be able to keep
> using Fedora  :)
> 
> if that's not the case, I'd love to know what signals they're
> sending that cause my monitor to lock up.  Any time the power
> button isn't able to function, you've got some major problems
> in your code...
> 
> Summer
> 

This certainly is a strange phenomenon.  I've never heard of a monitor
locking up before.  You might want to be careful, this doesn't soung
good for the monitor.  Can you try it with another (CRT or LCD)
monitor?  More likely a config problem than code issues I would
assume.  Your monitor must not like switching between whatever two
modes it is going from doing the text to X transition.  If you could
get a hold of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and send it, that might be
useful.  Do you have any other OSs installed that work okay?  Or did
you have one installed that worked?  Information about your hardware
and setup are probably going to be helpful.

Jonathan