Gnome 3 fallback mode, ATI radeon mobility X700

[Porrum_doctum]

Hi,

I recently installed F16 (from the dvd) on a ~6 year old laptop. All works reasonably well, but I'm stuck in gnome 3 fallback mode and I'd very much prefer to use the full shell.

My graphics card is a ATI radeon mobility X700, and I've seen it handle this system before, so it is possible.

When I boot from the F16 LiveCD, the gnome shell is perfectly fine. I did some version checks and find 1.11.1-1 for xorg packages and 3.1.0-7 for the kernel on my cd (mid december '11). I tried downgrading to these versions for my local install, but still no full shell. Do I need to assume the shell is unable to load (I don't get a 'something went wrong' sad smiley), or is it also possible that something is just disabled?

I don't have any catalyst-stuff installed, as far as I know, and I'm using the xorg-x11-drv-ati package. With that one, I get at least my maximum 1280x800 resolution in fallback mode. If I disable the drv-ati package, I also loose that and get 1024x768 and fallback mode.

Furthermore, I don't know whether it's related, but at boot time I don't see the fedora loading balloon, only the minimal-graphics white/pale blue/blue loading bar. (I remember having to do the install in minimal-graphics mode because the graphical one didin't want to load.)


Please let me know which logs, test results, ... I can provide to help you diagnose and hopefully solve this problem quickly. I could of course try to re-install from my livecd, but I'm (naively) thinking this thing should have a relatively easy solution.


Thanks in advance,
Sara

[Agent20]

Hi

When you do an install with the basic graphics option it sets up an xorg.conf file which specifies the vesa driver and turns off kernel modesetting at boot.

(You will need to make the following changes as root)

If the file /etc/x11/xorg.conf exists then rename it to something else (no xorg.conf file should be required with the open source drivers).

Edit the /etc/default/grub file to remove the "nomodeset" parameter from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX section and then rebuild the GRUB2 configuration with the following command:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Reset the default kernel selection to the newest kernel:

grub2-set-default 0

When you reboot you should get the graphical boot sequence and have accelerated graphics at the native screen resolution.

[Porrum_doctum]

Thanks agent20, that fixed the problem. I can't believe I didn't think of the nomodeset parameter...