FC8 trouble

[andycon]

Hello,

I'm about at the end of my rope at this point. Let me try to explain my situation briefly.

I purchased an XFX GeForce7900 video card a while back. It was working well, until it started overheating randomly. After it happened a few times, I ended up with some sort of corrupted log file which couldn't be overwritten for some reason, so my x server wouldn't load (as it needed to overwrite the old log file in order to create a new one and load the x server I guess?). At that point I was frustrated and I had been waiting to upgrade from FC7 to FC8, so I popped in my FC8 live CD, formatted the harddrive, and installed FC8. Now I'm having all sorts of video issues.

FC8 seems to have installed with the "nv" driver being loaded by xorg.conf. This just won't work for me for some reason (I'm using the onboard GeForce6150). Once the graphical part of the boot process starts (past GRUB, GRUB seems to work just fine), my monitor goes black and I can't see anything that's going on. I've tried to Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a command prompt, but the screen goes all corrupted on me and displays random blocks of green and white on the black screen. I've tried hitting "I" during the earlier part of the boot process to stop it from trying to load the x server in interactive mode, but before interactive mode starts, the screen goes black again, and nothing happens. If I could only figure out some way to get FC8 to install from the live CD with vesa as the driver, I could probably take it from there. I've also tried using my roommate's computer to burn the full installation DVD but it keeps crapping out on me, so that's not an option.

PLEASE, I'm going nuts here. Does anyone know a way to influence which driver is written to xorg.conf during installation of FC8 with a live CD? Or any other solution to my problem?

[sidebrnz]

Try replacing the fan on your video card or, if it doesn't have one, put a case fan where it can help. (If you have a choice, put it in a slot that's not next to another card on either side if possible as well.)

[andycon]

thanks for the reply, but my problem is not with the video card...i sent the faulty one back, and just got a replacement....i'm only using the motherboard's on-board GeForce6150 at the moment...

[marko]

So then sidebrnz's idea of the dead fan isn't the problem since the
6150 doesn't have a fan I think(? too wimpy). I have a 6100 Nvidia
on one of my AMD64 machines and it's fanless so I'm not sure about the
6150.

Anyway, I think you can quickly press Esc to get out of the graphical install
page and it opts down to the console "boot:" prompt, then use "linux text"

boot: linux text

to install F8 in text mode. ASAP, you want to edit the /etc/inittab to make
the initdefault be 3 instead of 5 so it boots to multiuser text mode.
You might need to edit the grub.conf to comment out the "rhgb"
or probably better, use the grub edit option to manually remove the
rhgb and add "3" to the line so it goes to runlevel 3 without having
to deal with the inittab and grub.conf file since you only need to
boot a few times like this.

When you're done you can install the livna rpm as root from
the text console

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-livna
yum install kmod-nvidia

The kmod-nvidia install should edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to have
the driver be "nvidia" instead of "nv" and it will use the
proprietary driver. All this assumes that your 6150 just has some
problem with nv that the the nvidia driver won't cause.

After the gui is working by manually starting it with startx,
then set the inittab 3 back to 5 so it's automatic.

Mark

[andycon]

Thanks for the tips. When I try to boot from my hard drive after installing from the live CD, the GRUB loader pops up just fine, and the text part of the boot also works. Just after udev loads, it tries to start the graphical part of the boot, and that's when my monitor craps out. Even if I wait for the boot to finish and Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a command prompt, all I get is random crud on the screen, so I'm unable to modify my xorg.conf file at all.

I'm going to try to reinstall tonight after work, this time trying the Esc button trick you mention, to install in text mode. Hopefully this will allow me to get to a point where I actually CAN edit inittab or xorg.conf.

You mention "rhgb" and removing it from the boot commands. What does "rhgb" do exactly? Is that what tells the computer to boot in graphics mode? I'll try messing with that as well. As it is I'm just totally unable to modify xorg.conf to switch drivers, because I can't get to a command prompt to do it, or if I am getting to a command prompt, I can't tell because the monitor won't display it properly.

Thanks again for the tips, and I'll post the results after work.

[marko]

rhgb is Red Hat Graphical Boot, it's that graphical page that shows the
various modules and services starting, there's a "Show Details" option
on the page you can see more of the boot process by pressing
Alt+D. I figured by turning that off you'd get less chance of
interference with the graphics.