Display problems with Fedora 8 on a 64-bit system with an ASUS EN8600GT graphics card

[palaste]

I recently upgraded my entire computer to a new system, running Fedora 8 on a 3.0 GHz 64-bit Dual Core CPU. It is working otherwise fine but I am having problems with the display. When I originally plugged everything in and booted the system up, it showed fine in text mode but graphics mode was messed up: it was shifted too far to the right, and when I got Fedora 8 to boot up after installation, the vertical size of the picture had somehow doubled so that the lower half of the picture was missing. The resolution (number of existing pixels) remained the same, but one pixel now took twice the amount of physical vertical screen estate, leaving me with an elongated upper half and an invisible lower half. When I got it to log in to Fedora 8, I managed to switch the update frequency from 60 Hz to 75 Hz, and that appears to have solved the problem. It's still shifted too far to the right though - I shifted the picture on the monitor all the way to the left and it's still missing a couple of pixels.

It says on the box that my graphics card is an ASUS EN8600GT but Fedora 8 reports it as nVidia Corporation GeForce 6100 nForce 430. Are these the same thing? I don't want to risk losing the picture altogether trying incompatible graphics card drivers. The motherboard has one VGA output and one DVI output. The card itself has two DVI outputs and no VGA outputs. Only the VGA output shows any picture. The card came with a VGA-to-DVI adapter, but when I tried it with the DVI outputs, none of them showed a picture.

When the computer boots up, the logo in the motherboard chipset firmware displays correctly, and the text mode displays perfectly. When Fedora 8 boots up X, I see this weird vertical size duplication. When I log on, and Fedora 8 loads my personal settings, the vertical size is OK, but the display is shifted horizontally too far to the right.

What is happening here? What is the cause of all this? How can I fix it?

Additionally, what is this DVI thingy? Do I need to buy a new monitor to take advantage of it? My current monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 913N.

Thanks in advance!

[PabloTwo]

Hello palaste, and welcome to the fedora forum.

What is happening here is that the nvidia drivers supplied by your fedora install are not working well with your video card. What you need to do to fix the problem is to install the proprietary 3D video drivers from Nvidia. There are two ways to go about doing that.

1) The harder way: Download the driver for you card directly from Nvidia's website. They will be compiled against your current kernel version, plus you'll need a few other packages prior to attempting that process.

2) The easier way: Install the Livna repository, then yum install the pre-packaged rpm video driver package from Livna.

To take the easy way (#2), open a command line terminal and type:

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

Then reboot. There are many current threads regarding issues of installing Nvidia video drivers on F8 as well a numerous how-to guides. Use the search function to review some of those threads. I don't know if the 8600GT card is affected, but the 8800 series of cards are having problems with the current livna kmod-nvidia package in F8 and the drivers from the livna-testing repo seem to be fixing this issue, for some.

Paul

[palaste]

Thank you a million times, PabloTwo!
I did exactly what you said in "#2 - the easier way" and it fixed my problem straight away. I'm the most computer-savvy person in my entire family but it's nice to know that even I have people to turn to when I have problems.

[PabloTwo]

You're welcome.... a million times

Paul