No X11 but I can watch video on the framebuffer??

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Hi everyone. I'm having a problem that I can't even classify easily. I'm running Fedora c.12, on an AMD Athlon 64. The system is quite old: seven years old.

I've been unable to boot into X since August and in fact the same goes for Win XP and 7. First my screen started randomly going black and the system freezing, now I can't load a graphical desktop except for Windows 7 safe mode (I don't have the option to start XP in safe mode because the 7 bootloader took it away; oh how I laughed!). I've been trapped in text-mode hell ever since

As the problem manifested across three OS's (well, two and a half) I figured it's a hardware fault. Indeed, I checked inside my box and found my graphics card fan had stopped, er, fanning? I thought I'd just get a new card, but then I decided to spend some time getting to know text-mode better.

And here's where the plot, as they say, thickens. It seems the only thing I can't do in Linux is load X. I can, however, do all sorts of things on the framebuffer, even watch video with mplayer (that's actual video, not ascii), use links2 with "-g" and read .pdfs with fbgs. That can't be my graphics card then! Besides, Windows 7 lets me use a 1280x1024 resolution without problem! The card is working, or isn't it? Btw, the card is a Radeon 9600 series.

So, I tried running a few diagnostics, and it seems one or both of my memory banks have errors, but I'm watching high-resolution video on the framebuffer and doing all sorts of other memory-intensive things, and there's no crashes! So then it can't be my RAM either!

Just what is going on here?

I'll take any suggestions, as long as they don't involve holy water and a retired priest

[Rubberman]

Oh well... I was going to suggest an exorcist and some magical incantations, but...

In any case, you obviously have some hardware problems with both the video board and memory banks (overheating possibly?). Just because you can use the framebuffer to display videos and photos isn't really relevant here. To run the Xorg/X11 server the entire video board and available memory has to be pretty much intact, which your's is obviously not. So, fix the hardware (sometimes overheating RAM can be fixed by re-arranging the positions of the SIMMs - I fixed mine that way). A new video board should cost you well under $100USD.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I suppose you're right, it's time I go get some new stuff. It's just very annoying because my motherboard can't take the newer cards, or processors, so I'll need to buy a whole new system basically. Ah. This time i hope it makes the decade

Btw, I think I understand what you say about Xorg, but what really has me confused is the windows safe mode, which runs just fine and at a high resolution. I guess there's a low-level driver running there too. I should probably check <_<