I've just installed FC9 (this morning, as a matter of fact) and I am having a problem that's beyond my ken.

I'm in my X session (F7). I switch to a text terminal (<Ctrl><Alt>F1) to run some stuff in text mode. I then switch back to the X session (<Ctrl><Alt>F7) to return to... nothing. Blank screen, no keyboard input accepted. I cannot switch back. I'm not sure if X has died or not. I'm definitely not sure how to diagnose and correct it.

I'm running FC9 with ATI Radeon HD 3450 running the open-source radeon driver.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I did some testing and I found that the xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd driver seems to work for the VT switching.

It's a bit flaky displaying the console, but things work to the point that I could wait for updated drivers.

This is an important issue to me and could cause me to go to another distro. I've heard a lot about Unbuntu, but I'm so engrained with the way that Fedora/Red Hat does things, that to jump to the distro that "everybody" is raving about just seems like drinking the kool-aid.

I'm going to conduct some more research, but if anyone can direct me to some unbiased articles (Unbuntu vs Fedora), I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

F9 (not FC9) uses the new release of Xorg(major changes). It will take a while before all the drivers catch up. The first month or so after release there were no Nvidia drivers becuase they do not release drivers for beta version of Xorg (Xorg had fallen behind schedule). Once Xorg was official the drivers were released. I imagine the situation is the same at ATI. With the shuffle of AMD buying out ATI I would expect an little extra lag time.

I'm sure I'm being a bit impatient.

This was my first system build using ATI. My prior system is running FC7 with an old Nvidia Geforce card. Under the proprietary drivers from Nvidia, the thing just works (not counting using the 3d desktop effects, I don't want them). I was hoping for the same from ATI, but, again, I guess I'm being impatient going for a recent release of Fedora.

Maybe I should try to downgrade the kernel or downgrade to Fedora 8 for the time being... I dunno.

Anyway, If I have to tough it out for awhile, then the radeonhd driver will get me to where I'm going since I do not have to be on the text console often.

The OpenGL use with this driver is not that great at full resolution. It looks like the CPU is doing all of the work and sending the calculated data to the card for display. Or, the 3450 card was a poor choice on my part. (Had a bad experience with Nvidia and DVI).