Full install F11 to my old Toshiba Laptop

[CoccoBill]

Hi all

I have an old Toshiba laptop, with PIII, 512MB ram, 20GB HDD, where I would like to fully install F11.
I ran the LiveCD for a little while. Things seems to run OK, with the exeception of the screen resolution. The screen is 15" with 1024x768, however with the LiveCD it runs only at 800x600, and therefore I have a black frame around the centered screen.
If I do a full install, is there any way I can find/update drivers, and run the screen resolution at full size ? The video card is a

Trident Video Accelerator Cyber Blade XP Ai1 v6.4022-016b.22 ICDNP

[CSchwangler]

What does

xrandr

report when you run it from command line? The command xrandr will give you possible resolutions along with refresh frequencies.

[cschwangler@X31 ~]$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0*+   60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        59.9  
[cschwangler@X31 ~]$

[CoccoBill]

What does

xrandr

report when you run it from command line? The command xrandr will give you possible resolutions along with refresh frequencies.

[cschwangler@X31 ~]$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0*+   60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        59.9  
[cschwangler@X31 ~]$

It gives me the same options available through the display setup:
800x600
640x480
400x300
320x240

And the top row, says 800x600 maximum

No 1024x768

[CSchwangler]

I've tried to find information on the availability of drivers for your graphics card, but without luck. You could try another live Distribution, e.g. Ubuntu, and see if they can provide you the desired resolution. Ubuntu also has a good tool for managing proprietary drivers. If Ubuntu suggests a proprietary driver, you can use that information to search for an equivalent. If I am not wrong, Ubuntu still uses xorg.conf. If it works in Ubuntu, you may be able to copy that xorg.conf over to Fedora. I've done that a couple of times.

[CoccoBill]

I've tried to find information on the availability of drivers for your graphics card, but without luck. You could try another live Distribution, e.g. Ubuntu, and see if they can provide you the desired resolution. Ubuntu also has a good tool for managing proprietary drivers. If Ubuntu suggests a proprietary driver, you can use that information to search for an equivalent. If I am not wrong, Ubuntu still uses xorg.conf. If it works in Ubuntu, you may be able to copy that xorg.conf over to Fedora. I've done that a couple of times.

Will give it a try. Just completed downloading Ubuntu now.

[CoccoBill]

Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD would not start properly. After the initial screen, where the language is selected, I got a list of errors. However, regardless of errors, the text on the screen was centered as if the screen was set also to 800x600. I could not go any further.
The same disk on this laptop runs fine.

I would really like to complete a full install to that laptop...any more hints ? I thought about PCLinux OS...

[cgcedisto]

Hi all

I have an old Toshiba laptop, with PIII, 512MB ram, 20GB HDD, where I would like to fully install F11.
I ran the LiveCD for a little while. Things seems to run OK, with the exeception of the screen resolution. The screen is 15" with 1024x768, however with the LiveCD it runs only at 800x600, and therefore I have a black frame around the centered screen.
If I do a full install, is there any way I can find/update drivers, and run the screen resolution at full size ? The video card is a

Trident Video Accelerator Cyber Blade XP Ai1 v6.4022-016b.22 ICDNP

I had the same issue with an old Toshiba laptop and needed to create an xorg.conf file. I downloaded and used the system-config-display package to do this. This issue was that without the manual xorg.conf file to override the automatic configuration the old Toshiba LCD panel was not recognized so the system defaulted to a generic 800x600 display.. With the system-config-display tool you can select a generic 1024-768 LCD panel and generate the xorg.conf file, log out and back in, and I had the 1024x768 display.

[CSchwangler]

You can find some details about how to create a custom xorg.conf here

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_xorg.conf

You can do that only after installation is complete.

[CoccoBill]

I had the same issue with an old Toshiba laptop and needed to create an xorg.conf file. I downloaded and used the system-config-display package to do this. This issue was that without the manual xorg.conf file to override the automatic configuration the old Toshiba LCD panel was not recognized so the system defaulted to a generic 800x600 display.. With the system-config-display tool you can select a generic 1024-768 LCD panel and generate the xorg.conf file, log out and back in, and I had the 1024x768 display.

You can find some details about how to create a custom xorg.conf here

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_xorg.conf

You can do that only after installation is complete.

Tnx 4 support.
It looks like there is a solution. I will now go on and complete the full install first. We'll get back and let you how I get along.

[CSchwangler]

Good luck! Hope you get it working.

[CoccoBill]

Good luck! Hope you get it working.

Tnx I need it indeed. For the moment I cannot even get the laptop to boot from the same LiveCD it booted from earlier on.... will try and burn a new CD.

Or probably better, install from the standard DVD instead of the LiveCD.

[CSchwangler]

If the DVD works for you, it is probably better to use that, because it will not boot into a live environment. This saves you some time.

[CoccoBill]

If the DVD works for you, it is probably better to use that, because it will not boot into a live environment. This saves you some time.

Downloading it now 10 hours to go

[beaker_]

I had setup the same laptop with with F10. Also try adding nomodeset as a boot option, bump up your shared memory (64MB seamed best as I recall) and man trident (i think that's the driver) for options. I could about 100-150fps out of it and gnome ran quite well but no kde desktop effects.

[CoccoBill]

While downloading the DVD installer, I managed to boot again from a new LiveCD. I wen on to install to Hard Drive, however, at some point, I got the following error msg:

An error occurred mounting device /dev/sda1 as /boot: mount failed (2, none). This is a fatal error and the install cannot continue. Press <ENTER> to exit the installation.

I have a 20Gb HDD, and during the install process I had selected to use the entire space, and used the default partitioning plan.