On Dec 6, 2011 7:52 AM, "R. G. Newbury" <newbury@mandamus.org> wrote:
>
> On 12/05/2011 10:47 PM, Lawrence Graves<lgraves95@gmail.com>
> > On 12/05/2011 01:32 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> >> >  On 12/04/2011 09:44 PM, Lawrence Graves<lgraves95@gmail.com>
> >>> >>  On 12/04/2011 07:44 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
>
> >> >
> >> >  1 Add rdblacklist=nouveau to kernel grub line (done)
> < big snip>
> >> >  18        Reboot to check.
> > After doing all the above from 1-18, it is still doing the same thing
> > and gave me the same screen as when I first start this journey.
>
> This brings to mind the Holmes Corrollary to Murphy's Laws:  "Any law of
> chemistry or physics to the contrary notwithstanding, if it happened, it
> must be possible".
> This is very weird.
>
> Can you at least report that some of the steps worked???
> Did the reboot at step 4 work? (The vesa driver only step).
> Did you at least see the nvidia driver loaded at step 8?
> Did startx get you to the graphical desktop in step 9?
>
> I didn't closely follow the beginning of the thread. Could you repeat
> what hardware you are using, and confirm the distro level (F15 I think)
> and kernel. I am interested in confirming the video chipset and the
> wireless chipset, since *something* weird is going on, involving those...
>
> Geoff
>
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I've had some very frustrating problems with making GPUs work, learned a little, and experienced an incredible amount of guidance and patience from the Fedora community along the way.  I'll throw out a couple observations I've made that may help.

You might have a hardware conflict with the wireless card, or not.  There are a number of ways to troubleshoot this, the simplest of which is physically removing the wifi card.  It's usually a few screws for the plastic cover, one or two screws for the ~1in by ~2in card, and antenna cables you should probably tape to insulate.  This may help:  http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins9400/en/sm/index.htm

With the last two Fedora releases, installing kmod-nvidia has automagickally ran dracut and appended my grub entry. Likewise, removing it has revoked those changes, as far as I can tell.  If you need to remove the nvidia drivers for testing, I would suggest using this command:
yum remove $(rpm -qa | grep nvidia)
Try the section inside the parentheses by itself to see what's going on.  After you remove the packages, you will need to reboot for the changes to take effect. 

It is also a good idea to install akmod-nvidia with kmod-nvidia.  The driver needs to be built for a specific kernel, and when they get out of sync, this will fill in the gaps.

Experimenting with kernel parameters can be diagnostically useful, or provide a workaround. To use them, when grub presents the menu of kernels to boot, press 'e' to edit, then add them to the line that begins with 'linux.' A few I've found useful when troubleshooting are:
1 - boots to a fallback root console.  You have probably already found something like this.
nomodeset - disables kernel modesetting, changing how the kernel works with the GPU and it's driver.  I don't understand it well enough to offer a more technical explanation, but I know its worth a try with and without it.

acpi=off - disables advanced power management features.  Laptops are especially prone to poor acpi implementations.  I have to use this to boot with the nvidia drivers on my MSI laptop.  I also noticed that this disables suspend and causes the power button to instantly drop power to the system, so press it with caution with acpi disabled.

One more thing - I can't recall if the default nouveau drivers didn't work for you, or if you weren't happy with them.  At the very least, we should be able to get vesa drivers working for you.

HTH,
Pete