A long, strange FC3 problem (fwd)

[Jonathan Berry]

On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 15:36:57 -0700 (MST), Summer Brooks
<brooksj at wildhorse.com> wrote:
> 
> > Yes, I saw your previous emails.
> 
> Wasn't sure   :)

That's okay : ).

>
> > 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).
> 
> Since the machine still has FC3 installed on it, I downloaded and built
> 6229, and I'm having some very odd problems with that currently...
> the nvidia module won't load during boot, so the system complained about
> not finding it.  I checked modprobe.conf, and it looked like the install
> added a "*" in there, so I removed that, and the system sees the module
> on boot now, but the X initialization fails, claiming "Screen(s) found,
> but none have a usable configuration".

There is some extra work for FC3 since it uses udev.  See
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/udev/ for the details.  I'm not sure
what editing the modprobe.conf did.  Basically, with the nvidia module
loaded do:
cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*
I assume you changed your xorg.conf file to have Driver "nvidia"
instead of "nv".

> My default settings were 1280x1024, 24bit color.  I haven't changed
> the settings for the monitor (HorizSync 30.0-83.0; VertRefresh 50.0
> to 75.0), and I don't have another monitor that I can easily lay
> my hands on to try... I have an old CRT (really old), but I don't
> know if it'd even work at anything above 640x480, which I'd like
> to have as a comparison.

Yeah, I guess that's not an option, then.

> > 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.
> 
> On this particular box, RH8 and RH9 ran just fine for a little over
> a year, and nothing like this ever happened.  There was one instance
> a few months ago where Mozilla locked up on me in spectacular fashion,
> but I wasn't able to duplicate that behavior at the time.  And before
> FC3, having the monitor lock up to the point where none of the buttons
> did anything, not even the power button, was definitely fresh and new.

Okay, so it did work before, then.  I wouldn't be concerned about one
lock up.  Computers are complicated things, and every once in a while,
something strange can happen.  It definitely seems something in Fedora
is causing the problems then.  You don't happen to have your old
config files, do you?

> I can send my xorg.conf in a few minutes, if you really want to see
> it... anything else you can think of that'd help?   the Xorg logs
> from when I manually run startx?
> 
> Summer

Yes, do send your xorg.conf.  From the above message, something isn't
quite right there.  If you see anything that looks helpful in the log
files, send those lines, but normally the logs are huge and contain
only little bits useful information.  A lot of redundant errors.  I
can't think of anything else right now.

Jonathan