after grub, stripy screen

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 19:55 +1300, Grant Allan wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 02:59:28PM +1300, Grant Allan wrote:
> >> >> i think it is a bug that anaconda does not set up /etc/inittab to
> >> match
> >> >> the settings used when installing.  eg. if the user types "linux
> >> >> resolution=800x600" when installing, then that same setting should be
> >> >> put
> >> >> into /etc/inittab.  what does anybody think about that?
> >> >
> >> > Good, no, great idea.  Actually it installs at a fairly low common
> >> > denominator because initially it doesn't know what it's working with
> >> > or even if it can work with it.  When it gets to X configuration, if
> >> > it can come up with something workable (as far as it can tell) it
> >> > writes that info to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
> >> >
> >> > /etc/inittab is not the right place by any stretch of the imagination.
> >>
> >> hey, thanks!  do you think i should make an official suggestion
> >> somewhere?
> >>  is that easy to do?
> >>
> >> cheers,
> >> grant
> >
> > Umm, I think one of us misunderstood.  What I said was that it is
> > already doing The Right Thing _if_ it figures out the video card
> > correctly.  In your case it did its best to configure for the card,
> > and since it couldn't see your side of the monitor, it went with what
> > it saw on its side.  And it was wrong.
> 
> I see.  My suggestion then, amounts to "do not do The Right Thing if the
> user is installing with a custom display setting".  My thinking is along
> these lines: if the user has gone to the trouble of running the installer
> with a custom display setting, then there is most like a good reason that
> they chose to do that (eg the default display settings were not working). 
> I think that anaconda doing "The Right Thing" is presumptious in that
> case.  But that is just my own opinion.

When anaconda tries to install in GUI mode, it does so by setting up
the most innocuous options it can (VGA mode using the vesa driver,
640x480x8).  Unless you have some odd hardware, this should work--even
on nVidia chipsets.  The actual operational GUI settings are done much,
much later during the install (actually during the "post install"
phase).

If this is the same hardware that NTLDR disappeared from, where
Windows forgot what NIC you had and you got weird display stuff doing
a GUI install, then one must suspect that you're having hardware faults
of some kind.  Flakiness in the PCI bus (dirty contacts, misaligned
cards and such) can wreak havoc with your machine.  I highly recommend
that you shut down the machine, open it up, reseat your memory sticks
and PCI bus cards, button it back up and try again.

You should also try running memtest86 from the boot command line off the
FC4 installer disk and verify that you don't have a flakey RAM card:

	boot: memtest86

Windows tolerates bad RAM far, far better then Linux does.  That's a
"bad thing" IMHO (bad RAM, unless correctable via ECC hardware, should
cause the machine to shut down because if you can't trust the RAM
contents, you can't trust anything else), but it appears to be a fact.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    I don't suffer from insanity...I enjoy every minute of it!      -
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