Having problems wit hFedora 12 - please help; it's driving me mad

[milob]

I have re-installed Fedora 3 times, each time, after a little while of use, when I am botting it up, it loads up, and before the login screen appears, the screen just goes black, and I end up with just a black screen and a white line in the top left corner flashing, thus resulting in me not being able to log in.

The exact same has happened a number of time, is anyone able to help?

Could it be something I had installed?

Also, whilst using it, on the third install, a few times a message appeared telling me there was a kernel error, could this be linked to the problem?

I was running Fedora in GNOME, but I had KDE installed too.

All help very apreciated,

Thanks.

P.S, I'm new to linux, so dont go to technical.

[MikeTbob]

It could be a graphics card problem, do you know which graphics card you have?
Can you boot any LiveCD and post the output of this command, as root user please?

lspci -nn

EDIT: it'd be very helpful maybe if you could post the exact error message.

[milob]

Right, what do you mean by a live CD?

My graphics card is ATI Radeon X800 series.

Thank you for your reply.

[MikeTbob]

A LiveCD, will run from the CD/DVD drive instead of installing to the hard drive.....most distros have a LiveCD version but I am not sure about Fedora 12. I would suggest that you try it anyway.......Insert the Fedora 12 CD and reboot the machine, let it load the CD if it will. If it works, then just open a terminal window and issue the command I post previously.
If it does not work, you can issue that command in Fedora, if you can get it to boot long enough.

[milob]

Oh, I understand what you mean, I will do it now.

thanks you.

[reed9]

I believe Fedora 12 tries to use kernel mode setting for you ATI card. Try passing nomodeset as a boot option.

I'm not super familiar with Fedora 12, so someone correct me if I'm wrong on how to edit the boot line, but I'm fairly sure you need to press and hold the CTRL key at the grub (boot) prompt. Select the kernel line to edit and append nomodeset to the end.

So the kernel line will look something like

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-fc12.i686 ro root=somelongnumber rhgb quiet nomodeset

There are some other options as well that might work. Boot into runlevel 3 by adding "3" to the end of that same line instead of "nomodeset".

This will boot you to a console.

Edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If this file doesn't exist, you may need to create it.

I like to use nano for editing from the console.

su -
nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

To the Device Section try adding one or more of these options.

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "AccelDFS" "off"
Option "DRI" "off"

So that section would look something like

Section "Device"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "AccelDFS" "off"
Option "DRI" "off"
Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "radeon"
EndSection

To reboot do

su -c 'reboot'

[milob]

Unfortunately, my fedora disk won't allow me to run it withhout installing it, however I do have other Linux disks (not Fedora) that do allow me to do so.

Does it matter if it isn't FedorA?

[reed9]

Not for the lspci command, no.

[MikeTbob]

You should try Reed9's suggestion too. It might fix your install.

[milob]

I am on a live disk of ubuntu

I typed in lspci -nn

Shall I copy and paste what terminal wrote back?


---

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lspci -nn
00:00.0 RAM memory [0500]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0547] (rev a2)
00:01.0 ISA bridge [0601]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0548] (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus [0c05]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0542] (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller [0c03]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:055e] (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller [0c03]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:055f] (rev a2)
00:04.0 USB Controller [0c03]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:055e] (rev a2)
00:04.1 USB Controller [0c03]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:055f] (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface [0101]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0560] (rev a1)
00:07.0 Audio device [0403]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:055c] (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0561] (rev a2)
00:09.0 IDE interface [0101]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0550] (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:054c] (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0562] (rev a2)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:0f.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:10.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:11.0 PCI bridge [0604]: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0563] (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration [1022:1100]
00:18.1 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map [1022:1101]
00:18.2 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] D