FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Daniel B. Thurman]

[Old thread: Hmm... I am trying to install FC4 but anaconda graphics broke!]

Hello all,

My System is:

- VA Linux Systems 501 (yes it is an old system)
- Video: Cirrus Logic  GD5840
- Monitor: Hitachi CM715

I tried to install FC4 "out of the box" and the GUI installation
fails.  I tried ALL SORTS OF THINGS and I could NOT
get FC4 to come up with the X11 windows system.

The video card is correcty found but not the monitor.

Here are things I tried:
=========================================
1) Did the GUI-based installation but was not able to continue
    because the screen was jumbled badly.

2) Did Text-based installation and installed everything and hoped
    that I can somehow fix the X11/GUI later:

  a) Manually added Monitor/Video details to /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
      tried to start X and does not work.

  b) Tried a/usr/bin/X -configure, and xorg.conf.XXX file was
      generated in /tmp and trying /etc/X11/X -conf /tmp/xorf.conf.XXX
      does work.  In fact it is much worse as the mouse could not be
      found even when manually added, along with specs for the video
      and monitor results in a blank screen and it appeared to hang.

3) In the many reboots, I tried to stop the boot process with "I" to
stop the probes but was unable to.  This is a seperate issue right
now but if anyone wants to test it, let me know how to get this to
work.

4) Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Ctrl-Alt-F1 did not work for me so
a forced reboot was necessary.

In general,  the X11 system does try to come up but the screen is
jumbled or interlaced-looking but otherwise very unreadable so I could
not do anything and the really wierd thing is that if you let the X11
run for 3-5 minutes it appears to look like a curses screen but
unfortunely with very weird characters and unreadable. There
is a blue border at the edges of the screen if that tells you
anything.

So - after banging on this all day, I gave up, and went back to
FC3 and god... the darn thing actually works "out of the box"
as with FC2 and FC1.  I see the GUI just fine (800x600) and I
was able to install as usual.  Seems that FC4 is really HOSED
for older systems?  This is not cool :-(

I am not sure if it is worth try to upgrade from FC3 to FC4 only to find
out that the X11 system would get hosed again.

Any thoughts?

Kind regards,
Dan

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