Sudden Graphics Problem

[MTK]

I insalled the driver for my Radeon HD 4870 graphics chipset (and also some updated for the OS) and now the monitor turns off once the OS loads and I cannot get to the desktop!

Is there a way to fix this without re-installing Fedora?

[Rubberman]

Boot into runlevel 3 (non-gui login), login as root, edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to change the video card driver to "vesa" (backup current settings first), save the file, and then run the command "startx". If you get your X desktop, then you can reboot and futz with your driver settings more rationally. The vesa driver is the generic graphics driver and won't support the higher resolutions your card+monitor are capable of, and won't do full-motion video very well (stutter, stutter...), but your basic desktop will be there to work with.

[MTK]

I don't really understand what all that means...

[Rubberman]

Ok. Do you have a liveCD that you can boot from?

[MTK]

The Fedora DVD does not have such an option.

But I do have a xubuntu live CD, if that would help.

[Rubberman]

You can do that. Boot to rescue mode (command line, not gui) and login as root (if it asks). Once on the command line, you will need to do the following:

1. Create a mount point for your hard drive root file system.
2. Mount the hard drive partition containing the root file system (/).
3. Assuming the mount point is /mnt/hd1, then cd to /mnt/hd1/etc/X11
4. Copy xorg.conf to xorg.conf.1 (or something like that).
5. Edit (with vi) xorg.conf and look for a line that starts: section "Device"
and has a line that says: Driver "radeon..."
Ie, "radeon something" or such like that. Change the part in the quotes to "vesa". Example:

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "vesa"
        BusID       "PCI:7:0:0"
        Screen      0
EndSection

Save the file and reboot without the CD.

[MTK]

But I don't know how to mount a drive in the command line or how to use vi. I will try to search for it.

[Rubberman]

There are a lot of things in Linux that are best handled by command line tools than a GUI. This is an example of that. The vi command is a text editor that comes with every Linux and Unix system. Documentation for most of these tools are available as man (manual) pages on the system. So, to find out how VI works in a general sort of way, try the command: man vi

When you boot from a live/rescue CD, the hard drives are not mounted. When you get the rescue command line, enter the command "fdisk -l" and report the results back here. Then we can tell you how to mount the hard drive and change your xorg.conf file.

[MTK]

I typed fdisk -l and the picture of what happened is in the attachment.

[Rubberman]

From the looks of it, /dev/sda1 is your /boot volume, and /dev/sda2 is your / volume (root file system. So, from the command line do this:

mkdir /mnt /mnt/hd1 /mnt/hd2
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hd1
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/hd2
cd /mnt/hd2/etc/X11
cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.1
vi xorg.conf

Once in the editor, you need to find the section that looks like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        BusID       "PCI:7:0:0"
        Screen      0
EndSection

Instead of "nvidia" for the driver, you should see something like "radeon..." or "ati...". Change the part inside the quotes to "vesa". Save the file, and reboot. To change the driver name to "vesa", do this in the editor:

1. Enter this EXACTLY before you do anything else:
:1,$s/"xxx"/"vesa"/
Note that the xxx is what appears in your file for the Driver entry. When you press the : key, the cursor will drop to the bottom of the screen and place the cursor right after a colon, then enter the rest.
3. Save the file by doing this EXACTLY:
:w!
4. Then quit:
:q

If that goes well, and you find yourself back at the command line prompt, then reboot the system with either the "reboot" command, or "shutdown -r now". Make sure you take the CD out of the drive after it gets back to the bios splash screen, but before it reboots into Linux.