Getting Fedora installed

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 00:32 -0600, Robert Rabinoff wrote:
> Dear list,
>  
> I have a greying homebrew PC, Athlon 1200Mz chip, 30 Gb + 120 Gb HD's,
> some more-or-less
> generic network card, and a Microtek 710S monitor and a DVD drive.  I
> have 256Mb RAM, and the
> installer insists on setting up a swap file right away.  When I go to
> install Fedora
> off the DVD everything is fine, the graphics look great (the screen
> resolution appears to be 1024x768), 
> the packages apparently install OK, everything is fine until I click
> the Reboot button.  
>  
> The machine then reboots, loads Fedora and gets to a screen that has
> some extremely low resolution,
> and what appears to be the following list of setup tasks:
>  
> Welcome
> License Info
> Firewall
> SELinux
> Date and Time
> Hardware Profile
> Create User.
>  
> The font is immense -- most of the items go off the right hand side of
> the screen.
>  
> There's a caret to the left, and hitting Enter moves it from one line
> to the next -- until it gets to Hardware
> Profile.  At that point it hangs.  Hitting the reset button just
> repeats the process.  It appears that it's
> not recognizing the monitor although as I mentioned, the installer had
> no problem with it at all.  I'm going
> to give it one more go this evening, hooking the monitor in directly
> rather than thru the KVM switch.
>  
> Anybody have any ideas?  Possible hardware compatibility issues?  I've
> asked around locally but nobody
> seems to have any solutions.
----
sounds like it's in 640 x 480 mode and it's not properly diagnosing
either your monitor or your video card....my guess, the video card and
that hooking it directly to the screen instead of the KVM won't change
things.

Next time, instead of re-installing, try this...

<Control><Alt><F1> # to get a virtual console
Login as root
type 'init 3'
type 'system-config-display --reconfig'
see if you can manually set the video card and the monitor (the monitor
perhaps to generic WHICHEVER and something like 1024x768 or whatever is
appropriate for your display)
Save it
type 'startx' to test it
type 'system-config-display --reconfig' until you get something that
works
type 'shutdown now -r' to reboot and the 'first boot' should run in a
mode that's usable.

Craig