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?
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.
--
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Fedora 8 & 9; Alpine 1.10, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.6;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2.0.3, Epiphany 2.20, Opera 9.27, Firefox 2 & 3
Remember I know little (precious little!) of what I am talking about.