What does basic video driver mean?

[MTK]

When you put in the Fedora disk, it has an option "Install system with basic video driver". What does that mean? If I am not going to download a video driver, is that the better choice?

[Roxoff]

It means use the default vga drivers - and you can upgrade them later once the system is working.

[MTK]

I installed it with basic video driver but now it doesn't recognize my monitor. It says that my monitor is "Unknown" and it doesn't even realize that there are 2 monitors.

[coopstah13]

What is your video card? You will probably have to use a utility or manually edit the xorg.conf file to allow multiple monitors. Also, if you have nvidia or ATI card you will need to install the proprietary driver to get the best performance.

[MTK]

The reason I am not using ATI's driver is that it makes my monitors turn off and system to lock up once it enters the GUI.

(I still would really like to find a way to have 3D acceleration, though - even desktop effects don't work.)

The graphics card is a Sapphire Radeon HD 4870.

[coopstah13]

You could try the open source radeonhd driver instead, this may work well enough for your needs.

[MTK]

I didn't know there was such a thing. Where can I get It?

[coopstah13]

It should be included with fedora, I'm not sure what the package would be called on fedora though, probably something like xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd that is what it is called on ubuntu, not sure about fedora. I would just do a yum search radeonhd and see what gets picked up. If it is already installed, you should be able to just specify radeonhd for the driver under the device section for the video card in the xorg.conf file.

[MTK]

I changed the driver from "vesa" to "radeonhd" and "Videocard0" to "Sapphire Radeon HD 4870" in xorg.conf, now the computer just boots into a terminal that doesn't execute any command that I give it.

On top of that terminal it says

lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
r8169: eth0 link down
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready

[coopstah13]

odd, you should be able to boot up into single user mode in order to change it back to vesa