Dell Inspiron 600M Video Problem

[Jim Cornette]

Tod Thomas wrote:

> I'm trying to load FC on a used Inspiron I just got.  I played with 
> the FC3 release all day yesterday, because I already had the CD's 
> burned, and couldn't get it to work.  I tried FC4 last night and am 
> still having the same problem.
>
> After the welcome screen, when I skip the CD validation check, 
> Anaconda starts running.  It notices my mouse and video card but says 
> the monitor is unknown.  After that I get a blank screen.
>
> I tried using 'linux lowres'.  That worked long enough for me to get 
> FC installed but once throught the reboot sequence I get the blank 
> screen again.  Very frustrating.
>
> I tried dropping to a command prompt and editing the xorg.conf.  I'm 
> not sure what my refresh rates should be so I followed an example 
> someone had posted on the web with a similar (but not exactly) setup - 
> no go.
>
> There seems to be a lot of people out there who have gotten FC to work 
> remarkably well on the dell insprion 600m, no problems at all.  I 
> can't seem to replicate that experience.
>
> Incidentally, I don't like either Gnome or KDE so I normally exclude 
> them, install X and then add my own window manager later.  Could 
> excluding the stock window managers be causing my problem?
>
> I'm stuck, any help would be appreciated.  I could use some pointers 
> to good doc references too.  Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?
>
>
> Thanks - Tod
>
>
> Dell Inspiron 600M
> 1.4GHZ Pentium M
> ATI M9 (ATI Mobility - Radeon 9000) video card.
> Quanta Display 14.1" (1400 x 1050) SXGA+
>
If you have no window manager, it would probably come up blank. There 
used to be a crosshatched pattern that showed up before, when no 
windowmanager was present.
Without either window manager, gdm or kdm would not be installed. I 
believe there is an xdm also. ( I use gnome, but install kde also, not 
sure about xdm)

Anyway, you could probably boot into runlevel 3 and install your 
preferred windowmanager. xfce is available from fedora-extras and the 
repositories are active for extras upon completed installation. If you 
prefer another wm, install that while in runlevel 3, then change to 
runlevel 5 or run startx from a terminal.

About the monitor, you could choose a generic choice for LCD and select 
1400x1050 to see if this would help with the montor.

Jim

-- 
QOTD:
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