Mandriva and X

[Garfy83]

Hi folks,

Having recently tried Mandriva Free on DVD, I have a huge problem that I cannot seem to rectify.

Many years ago when a friend recommended I try a version of Debian, I gave up after two days of near-solid trial and error to install the system and successfully configure the X server.

Since then I've stuck rigidly to using Windows as at least I had an idea of what I was doing and how to fix it if it went wrong.

I recently formatted my laptop hard drive with a view to installing a simple version of Linux that not only would run quicker than Windows XP Home (which was dying every few clicks) but would also not cost me a penny.

I started off by using the Mandriva Live CD to see if it would be compatible with the laptop (a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo L7300) and on all accounts it was problem free.

So I spent the next two hours waiting for the DVD iso file of Mandriva Free to download. After successfully burning the image to a DVD, I fired up the laptop with no fear of it going tits up.

All was well until the installation had finished and it was time to boot into X. Those days of the Debian nightmare came back to haunt me when all I got was a screen of fuzzy colour.

From what I could tell, it was laughing at my graphics card with a kind of "You must be joking" tone of voice. I have now tried to reconfigure the xorg.conf file to use a different graphics driver and yet it still doesn't work.

So, before I give in and purchase a new copy of Windows XP (since the clever people at Fujitsu-Siemens didn't supply me with a disc) can someone help me figure out what the hell I need to do to make Mandriva work?

As far as I can tell the laptop has an S3 Unichrome AGP graphics card with 64mb shared memory. The S3 Unichrome driver in X doesn't work and the generic VGA driver throws up errors.

Where do I go from here?

[Garfy83]

Hmm having seen the number of similar problems other people are having, perhaps I should try Fedora...

[devils casper]

did you try "vesa" driver? its a generic driver and works with all graphics cards.

[Garfy83]

did you try "vesa" driver? its a generic driver and works with all graphics cards.

Well I thought about that since the Live CD worked with vesa, but I can't work out how to change it to vesa before running X...

[techieMoe]

Well I thought about that since the Live CD worked with vesa, but I can't work out how to change it to vesa before running X...

From the command line, make sure you have root privileges by typing su followed by your root (administrator) password. Then open up your X Windows configuration file with a text editor such as nano:

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down toward the bottom of the file and look for a section similar to this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Nvidia Geforce 4"
    Driver      "nv"
    BusID      "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Change the driver from whatever it is to "vesa", then CTRL+X to exit. Answer "yes" when it asks if you want to save. Then try to restart X Windows.

[Garfy83]

From the command line, make sure you have root privileges by typing su followed by your root (administrator) password. Then open up your X Windows configuration file with a text editor such as nano:

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down toward the bottom of the file and look for a section similar to this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Nvidia Geforce 4"
    Driver      "nv"
    BusID      "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Change the driver from whatever it is to "vesa", then CTRL+X to exit. Answer "yes" when it asks if you want to save. Then try to restart X Windows.

That's exactly what I needed. Thank you very much