Blank screens for GUIs in Fedora

[Kitsune]

I've been working on putting Fedora 1 on my Shuttle SK41G and have been having a hellish time with the graphics. During install, it detected the onboard S4 chip, came up with 'Unknown Monitor' for my MultiSync 97F, then went blank. It didn't lock, ctrl-alt-delete made it immediately respond, shut down properly, and restart. I figured that the GUI for anaconda didn't like something in my system and did the text inteface install, everything did fine. Install completed, rebooted, boot text came up normally, screen went blank.

Evidently, whenever anything graphical tries to work, something in there screws up and gives me a blank screen instead. The OS doesn't seem to be crashing or anything like that, it's simply refusing to display any graphics. This is somewhat annoying to me, as I think it's trying to load KDE when it boots, which blanks out the screen before I get to any kind of command prompt, effectively locking me out of the system. Does anyone have any ideas about what needs to be fiddled with to make it play nice?

[Nerderello]

try the following to configure your /etc/X11/XF86Config file (as root) :-

XFree86 -configure

the screen will blank and, hopefully, come back, having created a file called /root/XF86Config.new . Now test this config file out by :-

XFree86 -xf86config /root/XF86Config.new

If you get the raw X screen (grey cross hatched screen with an X as a mouse coursor) then you have a working config file that just needs copying to /etx/X11/XF86Config (use the "cp" command). First cancel out of the raw X screen by Ctrl Alt BackSpace (not Del) and the do the copy. Then either reboot or type "startx" and with luck you'll have gdm or kdm to logon with.

If not, have a look in /var/log/XFree86.0.log (use "cat" or "tail" command) to see if iy gives any helpful messages.


have fun

Nerderello

[Kitsune]

Unfortunately, I discovered through some digging that the Shuttle mini computers and Linux don't get along well. Specifically, the onboard S3 ProSavage DDR video chip is poorly supported at best, and seems to cause this identical problem for everyone who has it. I'm considering going out and getting a cheap graphics board to put in there just to get the onboard video out of the picture.

[Nerderello]

ah well, such is life.

Check that the cheapo graphics card (perhaps from ebay) is supported.

Nerderello