Fedora Core 7 X Windows not starting
 

Hi,

I have VIA CLE266 northbridge ( UniChrome, S3 Savage castle rock graphics) + VT8236 motherboard on ECS G320 Laptop

I booted FC7 dvd, and tried installing with the graphical installer anaconda. It probed correctly for CLE266 but couldnt start x with it. Even VESA mode failed, and I was dropped to the text-mode installer.

Installation went smoothly, and when I restarted my laptop, fc7 booted fine, and dropped me to terminal mode. Tried running startx, with no luck. It complained, no screens found. On reading the Xorg.0.log, found that there was warning from fonts not found (ignored it..), ACPI faulty (tried ACPI=OFF kernel option), VIA driver error (mode(s) found, but not used). Then changed the driver to "vesa", and tried startx again, but again, no screens found (again) . Opened the log again to find
a) VESA: Bad V_BIOS checksum
b) VESA VBE DDC read failed

Also, I installed Knoppix 5.1 on harddisk earlier, and it was working fine on VESA. In grub, vbeprobe and testvbe used to fail, and so I couldnt get graphics mode in grub.

Now also, vbeprobe and testvbe fail in grub, but the fedora splashimage is displayed, so it must have been already in graphics mode. Is there any connection?

I will post the xorg.conf and Xorg.0.log soon from my laptop.

Any help would be appreciated...

Driver
 

Have you tried a different driver? There's a couple that -may- work for your card:

savage
s3

and possibly:

s3virge

Change the driver in the Xorg.conf to one of these and try starting X

Example:

Section "Device"
Indentifier "savage" <not sure if this matters>
Driver "savage"
EndSection

Thanks for the suggestion, i worked it out myself...

Changed back to the VIA driver, and specified the monitor hsync and vsync ranges in the xorg.conf , and now it worked :D

Section "Monitor"
Indentifier "Monitor0"
HorizSync 28.0-96.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Also added Option "DisableIRQ" in Section "Device" (just for kicks..)

I want to run the anaconda graphical installer, or some kind of graphical updater in FC7 to install some of the other packages in DVD. Is there a way to specify the hsync and vsync values while installing?

Still wondering, why the VESA driver wont work...