FC3 on a Compaq notebook: X trouble

[David Curry]

Douglas Frank wrote:

>(Oops, yep, I did mean runlevel 3.)  That's what I've been doing for the
>past hour.  Good thing they pay me the big bucks, I'd hate for this to
>be easy.  ;-)
>
>Upshot is this: Fedora probes my (on-board) video card and identifies it
>as an "S3 ProSavage KN133."  It is actually an "S3-VIA Twister K"
>according to s3graphics.com.  I've been running system-config-display
>trying various settings.  The only successful combination I've found so
>far is "generic 800x600" w/ "generic VGA display" and 256 colors.
>Still pretty much unusable :-]
>
>Googling around for this box, I see I'm in plenty of company in not
>being able to get X going on this laptop.  The funny thing is, I had it
>working with RH9.  Unfortunately I didn't save off the old conf file.
>
>:-(
>
>I wonder if RH9 had a driver for the S3 Twister that has since been
>dropped.
>
>On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 15:14 -0600, Thomas Cameron wrote:
>  
>
>>>I'm guessing there's a memory alignment problem.  This laptop takes 16
>>>MB off the top (I think) of main memory to use for video.
>>>
>>>I've got it up at runlevel 4 now and am experimenting with xconfig
>>>      
>>>
>>Boot into runlevel 3 and issue the command:
>>
>>system-config-display --reconfig
>>
>>This will allow you to set your monitor and display settings.
>>
>>Please report your results back!
>>Thomas
>>
>>    
>>
Seems to me there is a real possibility that the X driver may be the 
source of your difficulties.  RH9 worked with XFree86 (don't know the 
release) while FC3 is built using xorg-x11.  The XFree86 project did 
replace some drivers for ATI cards that prompted some display 
difficulties on a RH8 system I had so it is plausible that display 
driver changes could explain the unexpected difficulties you are coping 
with.