Fedora 6, Dell Optiplex GX260 and PCI Video

[Charles Gagnon]

So I made a bid of progress... I added the following lines to 
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist agpgart
blacklist intel_agp

And I rebooted. Right now I have that and the BIOS set to "OnBoard" and 
I'm trying to see if I can configure additional screen on the Matrox card.

It's not fixed yet but atleast I can boot without crashing.

Charles Gagnon wrote:
> But that will work if I have the PCI card in but I want to use the 
> OnBoard video right?
> 
> What if I want to use the Matrox PCI card? THe BIOS offers no option to 
> disable the OnBoard video.
> 
> And the PCI card does work, I get the Dell logo at the beginining then 
> the Fedora grub boot menu, finally I see a couple of line of kernel 
> stuff and than the crash.
> 
> Or am I misunderstanding the meaning of OnBoard and Auto?
> 
> Phil Meyer wrote:
>> Charles Gagnon wrote:
>>> I hit Fedoraforum.org with this but got nothing. It has been driving 
>>> me nuts. I searched the net high and low but I cannot put my finger 
>>> on what the problem is.
>>>
>>> I have a Dell Optiplex GX260 which I use with Fedora. It currently 
>>> runs an updated 'Fedora Core release 6 (Zod)'. I want to run 
>>> multihead on it.
>>>
>>> When I run with the onboard video adapter (part of the Intel 845G), 
>>> everything works okay. As soon as I try to use my PCI Matrox 
>>> G2+/QUAD-PL (Quad G200 32MB PCI), the kernel will not even unpack, or 
>>> it crashes with a weird EIP error and khelper message right after it 
>>> tries to load.
>>
>> This is a unique (in my experience) to DELL Optiplex video BIOS issue 
>> that is solvable.
>>
>> In the DELL BIOS, you need to set the video priority from AUTO to on 
>> board video.
>>
>> The Fedora kernels try to resolve the primary video for several 
>> reasons, and some other distro kernels do not, unless you build the 
>> fb, and other, modules into the kernel.
>>
>> The problem is that the AUTO setting will offer the wrong video card 
>> to the kernel as the default, causing the kernel to crash.
>>
> 

-- 
Charles Gagnon                   | My views are my views and they
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