A long, strange FC3 problem (fwd)

[Summer Brooks]

> Yes, I saw your previous emails.

Wasn't sure   :)

> Sorry, but no.  nVidia's drivers are not open source, and so do not
> qualify for inclusion with Fedora Core.  Also, nVidia doesn't allow
> distros to distribute their drives for some reason (I heard recently
> that this might have changed, but Fedora still will not include them
> for the previous reason).  What is included is the open-source "nv"
> driver which is not 3D accelerated.  What would be good is to download
> the drivers (get the 6111 from the archive along with the 6629 that is
> current, I'd use 6111 for FC2 and 6629 for FC3) from another computer,
> and boot to runlevel 3 to install them (from a flash drive or CD or
> something).

Since the machine still has FC3 installed on it, I downloaded and built
6229, and I'm having some very odd problems with that currently...
the nvidia module won't load during boot, so the system complained about
not finding it.  I checked modprobe.conf, and it looked like the install
added a "*" in there, so I removed that, and the system sees the module
on boot now, but the X initialization fails, claiming "Screen(s) found,
but none have a usable configuration".

My default settings were 1280x1024, 24bit color.  I haven't changed
the settings for the monitor (HorizSync 30.0-83.0; VertRefresh 50.0
to 75.0), and I don't have another monitor that I can easily lay
my hands on to try... I have an old CRT (really old), but I don't
know if it'd even work at anything above 640x480, which I'd like
to have as a comparison.

> This certainly is a strange phenomenon.  I've never heard of a monitor
> locking up before.  You might want to be careful, this doesn't soung
> good for the monitor.  Can you try it with another (CRT or LCD)
> monitor?  More likely a config problem than code issues I would
> assume.  Your monitor must not like switching between whatever two
> modes it is going from doing the text to X transition.  If you could
> get a hold of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and send it, that might be
> useful.  Do you have any other OSs installed that work okay?  Or did
> you have one installed that worked?  Information about your hardware
> and setup are probably going to be helpful.

On this particular box, RH8 and RH9 ran just fine for a little over
a year, and nothing like this ever happened.  There was one instance
a few months ago where Mozilla locked up on me in spectacular fashion,
but I wasn't able to duplicate that behavior at the time.  And before
FC3, having the monitor lock up to the point where none of the buttons
did anything, not even the power button, was definitely fresh and new.

I can send my xorg.conf in a few minutes, if you really want to see
it... anything else you can think of that'd help?   the Xorg logs
from when I manually run startx?


Summer