FC6 - i810 - boots to blank screen

Garim12 · #1 20th January 2007, 11:24 PM

I've been working on this one all day and I'm not sure where to go from here. I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate level on Linux; I have a few machines running Fedora in my house, but this one has just stumped me.

First of all, here's my hardware:

MB: Asus P5GZ-MX 945GZ (BIOS flashed to latest version)
Video: on board Intel GMA 950
CPU: Intel Celeron D 2.66 ghz
RAM: 512 mb
HD: WD 6.4 gig PATA ... I have 4 SATA drives that I want to set up as a RAID, but they aren't configured yet

X version: xorg-x11-server 1.1.1-47.4.fc6

I did a fresh install of FC6 on the PATA drive; going to use that for the system and have the RAID separate when I get that set up. I did manage to get X working somewhat, and have updated both X and the i810 drivers. Here's the really weird stuff:

If I set the video driver in xorg.conf to "i810":

Normal boot, run level 5, system goes through booting motions then when it's supposed to show the login screen, it shows a blank screen instead and locks. Have to hit hardware reset to get machine to do anything.

Normal boot, run level 3, system boots to the text prompt. I log in. At this point, I can type either "startx" or "init 5". BOTH bring me into X with no problems at all. If I then attempt to shut down or change the init level, then the whole system locks on a blank screen.

If I set the video driver to "vesa":

Any run level works, including run level 5. I get to a login screen and can go into X normally. However, the video is stuck in 640x480 res, which isn't very usable since most applications just simply don't fit on the screen... so I can't really do much (unless I figure out the commands to use in the terminal). But the system is otherwise fully useable.

This says to me that I have a configuration problem with the video card, since everything else runs fine in vesa mode. I set the BIOS settings for the on board video like this:

Internal Graphics Mode Select: Enabled, 1MB
Graphics Memory Type: Fixed
Fixed Graphic Memory Size: 63 MB

I've tried to use a generic monitor setup and to enter in all the information about my monitor (Sony CPD-100GS, 15" svga) including the refresh rates as they were listed in the manual. Didn't make any difference either way. I have also added the following line to the device section of my xorg.conf file per suggestions on this board:

Option "DisplayInfo" "FALSE"

Which helped a bit, without this line I couldn't even get as far as I have. Before this line, even doing startx from the run level 3 boot would lock up. Now I can at least do that.

I'm at the point where if I can't get the i810 driver to work properly, I'd at least be happy if someone could tell me how to get the standard vesa driver to work in higher than 640x480. This is just going to be a file server, so the video settings aren't really that important.

Thanks in advance, I hope this all makes sense to somebody.

Garim12 · #2 27th January 2007, 02:27 PM

I made a little (very little) progress. I set the video ram in the BIOS to 8mb and added a line to the xorg.conf, "VideoRam 8192". This has removed the weird graphics garbage that kept showing before the screen was initialized when going into the gui. But I still can't shut down and still can't boot directly into the gui.

Then I switched the driver from i810 to vesa and it will boot into the gui in 24 bit color now. I think the key there were the two settings to give it 8 megs of video ram. Because it worked with just the 1 meg, but can't get out of 8 bit color mode with that little amount. So everything seems fine now.