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