Distrowatch: What went wrong with Fedora Core 4

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 21:54 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 14 July 2005 21:22, Dave Jones wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 08:41:03PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > The real question seems to me, how did this new kernel get past
> > > testing if it won't even boot?  Thats now
> > > vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1390_FC4, the matching initrd, System.map etc. 
> > > The .1-1369 seems to be ok if I don't want to run X.
> >
> >The revelation this week seems to be that the livna nvidia rpm broke
> >modprobe.conf on a number of installations. Did you have this
> > installed by any chance ?
> 
> What would be the full name of that rpm?  There is not a livna entry 
> in any of the files in /etc/yum.repos.d if that helps.  They are 
> exactly as installed.
> 
> This is an nvidia card, a 5200 something with 128 megs of ram. From an 
> lspci:
> 
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 
> 5200] (rev a1)
That's almost the same one I have on my notebook:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX
Go5200] (rev a1)

I am currently using these 2 nvidia kernel-modules on this notebook:
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.12-1.1390_FC4-1.0.7174-0.lvn.4.4
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-1.0.7174-0.lvn.4.4

[Two kernels installed in parallel because of 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16234
which also hits me on this notebook.]

> I posted a verbatum copy of the screen in a previous message, the 
> error is output immediately after the 'booting the kernel' message.  
> The language is a bit obtuse, but I believe its because it cannot 
> find the hard drive(s) once the vmlinuz file is loaded and the exec 
> begun.  Something about unknown_*****(0,0) to be inexact.

Dave could be right, initrd is a hot candidate for the origin of your
problems.

Besides this, I would suspect you to suffer from the same issue I have
with this NVidia chip:
  It doesn't work with xorg's "nv" driver, it only works with the
"nvidia" driver. So, X not coming up with 1390_FC4 also could be an
indication of X not finding the nvidia kernel module corresponding to
this kernel.

rpm -qa 'kernel-*'
should tell you if you have installed it.

Ralf