FC5t3 installation issues with Radeon X300SE

[Mike A. Harris]

L. David Baron wrote:
> I just installed FC5t3 x86_64 on a brand new desktop machine with a
> Radeon X300SE, and ran into two issues that seem more likely related to
> that than anything else:
> 
> (1) Neither the installer, nor system-config-display once the installer
> had finished, were able to configure xorg so that it would start.
> However, I was able to do it manually by doing "modprobe radeon" and
> then rerunning system-config-display (which in turn writes out an
> xorg.conf that causes xorg to modprobe radeon by itself).  This suggests
> to me that something along the way (I'm not sure what) should have done
> a "modprobe radeon" to bootstrap the whole thing, but didn't.  (And
> perhaps does for other cards.)

Ok, that doesn't make much sense to me at all.  Dave disabled the radeon
kernel DRM module support for all R300+ chips due to it causing X to
hang when DRM loads if "Load "dri"" is present in the xorg.conf -
regardless of wether or not we actually ship the r300 DRI module.

So, loading the radeon module by hand should technically have no effect
on R300 hardware unless I'm missing something.


> (2) The text mode installer had serious graphics problems - there were
> some garbage characters around the "borders" of things, and things that
> were drawn after the screen initially drew were offset one character to
> the right relative to where they should have been on the basis of what
> was already there; this made things like package selection and
> partitioning quite difficult to use.

That problem has been reported for about a month now, and IIRC was an
ncurses problem which was claimed to be fixed.  Has nothing to do with
X however.


> I could file bugs on both of these if desired, but it would help to know
> (a) what component is appropriate and (b) what additional details I
> should give.  I don't feel like I have enough knowledge of either whose
> fault it could be or what could be related to file a usable bug report.

Re-reading the beginning of your email, I see you're claiming to have
just installed FC5test3.  All of these problems were present in
FC5test3, but have either been fixed since then, or worked around, to
the best of my knowledge.  You shouldn't be reporting any bugs or
problems to bugzilla or the lists until after you run "yum update" and
update everything to the latest software.  That is true after installing
any test release.  Otherwise you could be wasting both your time and
everyone elses, by reporting problems/bugs that have long since been
fixed.


-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.