Installing 0.95 graphically with an ATI Radeon 9800

[Martyn Drake]

Hi,

This evening I've installed Fedora Core 0.95 on my home machine which is 
a Dell Dimension 8300 configured with a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz processor on a 
Canterwood (i.e. 875P) motherboard.  I have an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics 
card (NOT the Pro version) with 128Mb RAM.

Anaconda will happily detect the correct graphics card and monitor 
(which is a Dell TFT 17" display whose exact model number escapes me, 
but that's not important) but when it boots into X to continue the 
installation I'm presented with a white screen and mouse pointer before 
the entire machine locks-up and I have to do a hard reset.  Not a 
problem, I'll try installing via text mode and that works a treat.

On first boot-up, Fedora goes into graphical start-up (which looks 
extremely nice, BTW - I love it!) and then starts up into first-boot 
configuration.  The Welcome to Fedora screen pops up and I click Next to 
continue after which the machine once again completely locks up and I 
have to do a hard reset.  Tried to drop to run level 3 upon the next 
reboot and start X normally and got as far as the Fedora Core logo 
before the whole machine locked up again.

When I next rebooted, I dropped down into runlevel 3 again, but this 
time installed the official ATI drivers, ran fglrxconfig and brought the 
system back up to runlevel 5 and all was well.  No problems since and 
I've now got to explore what's in this new release :)

Unfortunately I don't have any logs when the machine crashed - I can't 
see anything that would shed light as to why the standard X-server would 
cause the machine to completely lock-up the way it did.

Regards,

	Martyn