Weirdness with Fedora/XP upgrade
Matthew Saltzman
mjs at clemson.edu
Mon May 26 17:36:37 UTC 2008
On Mon, 2008-05-26 at 15:12 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> On Sun, 25 May 2008 18:41:29 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 16:28 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> >> Beartooth writes:
> >>
> >> > Consequence : those of us with F9 but no GUI are, apparently, up
> >> > the creek. We can't get X to work, and we can't downgrade back to F8.
> >>
> >> You can never downgrade to an earlier release. That has never been the
> >> case, and will never be the case, at least not until rpm is replaced by
> >> something else.
> >>
> >> You are at Nvidia's mercy, to release a driver that's compatible with
> >> F9. Perhaps it's now clear why non-free binary blobs are a bad idea.
> >
> > If the nv driver also doesn't work (I didn't see the beginning of this
> > thread, but Beartooth does say above "F9 but no GUI"), then he's also at
> > the mercy of the open-source kernel driver writers. They have not
> > necessarily been any faster than nVidia at fixing broken drivers or
> > supporting new cards.
> >
> > Beartooth: Have you tried the vesa driver? It worked with my nVidia
> > laptop card when nothing else would (when F8 was released), except that
> > it wouldn't turn off the backlight. I haven't seen any progress on that
> > bug (#351661) since I filed it last October.
>
> Vesa driver? I've seen the word during boot-ups on at least one
> machine; but since it means nothing to me, I don't even recall which
> machine. I'll be glad to try that or anything else I can; how do I do it?
I believe you can do this:
When you see the GRUB spash screen on boot, press a key. Select
the top kernel line of the options offered and type 'e', select
the kernel line and type 'e'. Append 'video=vesa' at the end of
the line. Type [Enter], type 'b'.
Then X should detect your video card as vesa, which is the most generic
sort of interface.
>
> Please, everyone, remember also that it may well be the brand-new
> monitor, which almost certainly did not yet exist when any of my machines
> were assembled, much less when the components in them were manufactured.
> I had been running an almost square LCD (19" I think; maybe more), and
> one morning it had decided it was a doornail.
>
> In fact, oddly enough, the machine I had feared might not be able
> to handle this monitor (and was prepared to sacrifice, since square
> monitors seem to be disappearing quickly from electronic fashion) is
> doing just fine -- with a 1280x1024 setting and a stretched display, but
> very usably; it's the newest one, whose compatibility I took for granted,
> that can't seem to run X.
>
> Also, please remember that it was F9 itself that told me the
> "unhandled exception" which aborted several installs was most probably a
> bug in Anaconda.
>
>
> So at least three hypothetical possibilities are tenable at this
> point, even plausible, afaik; I'll be glad to try anything against any of
> them, and report results.
If the machine boots, you can boot in runlevel 3 (edit the kernel line
in GRUB as above, but instead of "video=vesa" add "3". Then you'll get
a virtual console to log into. Then (as root) run
system-config-display --reconfig
and see if that helps.
>
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
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