Hey guys,

I'm sorry if this has been asked an answered before, but to be honest, I'm getting pretty fed up with linux. After three days of trying to stop ubuntu from freezing periodically (read every website and forum possible and applied every fix known) I thought switching to fedora would solve my issues...NOPE!

The situation:

I'm on a laptop where by I just completely wiped my HD clean with use of dd. Once I did this I installed XP to a partition consisting of half my HD, everything went well, windows was up and running fine. Now, popped in my fedora image DVD, rebooted, and my system proceeded to boot from the fedora disk. Filled out appropriate forms, checked and double checked the default partition that fedora made and started the installation.

Everything was fine up until the final package installed and it started "Installing bootloader" at this point my whole system froze...wtf...this is why I got rid of ubuntu! I reluctantly hard boot my laptop and fedora starts up in text mode, at this point I knew something was wrong, but i typed "startx" anyways so I could get some sort of GUI. I figured I would restart my comp so i tried, but nope, froze again! Sweet, only this time when i started up my comp and tried to type startx I got a millin errors:


/usr/bin/startx: line 143: cannot create temp file for here document: Read-only file system
xauth: error in locking authority file /home/<user>/.Xauthority
/usr/bin/startx: line 155: cannot create temp file for here document: Read-only file system

Fatal server error:
Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock

giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.
xauth: error in locking authority file /homo/<user>/.Xauthority


Comp specs:

LG LW40-44V4CU1
Intel centrino 1.7ghz
ati mobility radeon x600
gig of ram

Why is fedora freezing at "installing bootloader"? Why aren't I getting a GUI when loading fedora?! Sorry for the novel, but I'm quite frustrated and would love to see the good side of linux, any help greatly appreciated.

well first Fedora , and 9 in particular , is not geared towards the new linux user.Fedora 9 is so new that there is a lot, a whole lot of hardware that is not supported by fedora 9 .

Also if Ubuntu was locking up then there is most likely there is some hardware in the laptop that is supported by MS Windows only .

can you post your make and model of laptop and what hardware is in it .
Like the wireless card and is there a 3d card or just a "built in" 3d chipset.

hey man, appreciate the feedback. im at school right now so im not sure of my exact wireless card, i will update that when i get home. as for other hardware

LG LW40-44V4CU1 <--- make and model number

Intel centrino 1.7ghz

ati mobility radeon x600 (3d card)

1 gig of ram

PATA Fujitsu HD 80gig

OK, there seem to be two pieces of information here:

1. Ubuntu and Fedora do the same thing
2. If you start Fedora, you get command line mode and if you then type startx, it all goes pear shaped.

1) seems to imply that there is something odd about the laptop that is stopping install proceed normally.
Are you sure that the vendor hasn't got a hidden partition for bios extensions on the disk that is confusing the bootloader install process?
Did you try a 'live CD' to check that everything seems to work with your hardware (and get a visual partitioner, just to make sure that everything is as it seems)?
2) Seems to imply that a partition is being mounted read-only and that is stoping X from working.
Is there anything odd about /etc/fstab that could lead to / being mounted readonly?
(More likely, I guess) I think you may have had to shut down the computer in a non-clean manner and it is now waiting for an 'fsck' in order that the disk is safe and it should be mounted read-write. You probably got an error message (one of many) that gave you the exact command to fix this. Did it say anything that involved 'fsck'? Can you try booting again and watch the messages?

sorry let me explain the deal with ubuntu a bit more. Currently, on the ubuntu forums there is a 50 page plus thread (and many other threads on other forums) and god knows how many different bug reports were made, but there is a known bug with ubuntu freezing randomly, from people with very very different systems and hardware. Some people think it pertains to wireless cards, some to video cards and many other different theories; no one knows what's up.

In regards to ubuntu, i had it up and running, themse installed, ATI catalyst drivers installed, everything, but it would just randomly freeze from time to time (some times after 20 seconds, sometimes after 4 hours).

The problem i described in my first post was relative to fedora only (GUI not loading / freezing at "installing bootloader" screen)

I hope that helps you to help me :P

well here is the problem with fedora 9 "ati mobility radeon x600 (3d card)"
there are NO drivers for this with the xorg in fedora 9 .You need to downgrade fedora9's xorg to the one in fedora 8
SEE:
"Fedora 9 (F9) and ATI ( fglrx ) with working OpenGL!"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=189227
"Howto for fglrx (Ati driver) and Compiz-fusion"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=155503

so if i downgrade the xorg, will i be noticing worse than normal graphics performance? or will games , movies and all that still run well?

Seems like a pretty involved process, do you think its almost more worthwhile to just use a different distro of linux?