Wasn't Sure where this thread would fit in so I figured since the Operating System itself is software this would be a good place to start. If you need to move it you can but could you let me know where you move it to so I can find it again =) thank you.

Okay First here is the rig that I am using to place Fedora Core 8 on.

AMD Athlon 4200 X2
2GB RAM
40GB IDE Hard Drive
HP DVD R/RW IDE Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
ASUS Deluxe SLI-A8N Motherboard Socket 939

This is a frankenstein computer made from parts of old PC's and I wanna use it as an Extra computer and possibly a FTP sever for personal use once i get a bigger hard drive. The hard drive itself needs to be reformatted and have fedora core installed on it. I booted off the DVD with Fedora on it and ran the install. The media test went fine and the disc ejected. Then I told it to continue and the disc tray closed again and it started detecting my hardware. It picked up the AMD processor and the told me the exact model of my graphics card. Then the screen blacks out and the little X appears in the center of the screen where the mouse is. Then the screen turns to a messy looking black and white screen. The mouse pointer can be moved around but clicking and right clicking does nothing. Is this a graphics Problem? How can I fix this?

EDIT: So I tried installing in TEXT MODE little did I know that this means The OS is TEXT ONLY and command line. I have no Idea how to use this. At least It installed. Since the normal mode was giving me that black and white screen but is there a way to get a GUI after I installed in text mode?

EDIT: Okay so I got into runlevel 5 by using init 5 then it brings me to the GUI form of the login screen. As soon as i log in though I'm back to the problem with the black and white screen like my graphics card isnt working. Its weird though because I can see the login screen crystal clear and the boot menu that fedora pops up upon boot looks fine but when it tries to install in regular mode or when i init runlevel 5 and login I get this black and white screen. Whats going on here?

EDIT: Okay So I tried booting to Damn Small Linux on this computer and it boots all the way to where it detects hardware and boots the kernel. After this the screen goes black and just sits there. I don't know what the deal is with this. I'm downloading Fedora 9 and gonna see if that works any different.

Anyone got any Advice?

Sorry its so long just trying to give you all the facts. Thanks folks.

I just went through a similar battle. What you are describing sounds like either the wrong driver is loaded for your nVidia card, or the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is not set up properly. Don't panic, this can be sorted out.

If you can install, and get to a command prompt, then you can view and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

To tell if the driver from nVidia that gets installed is the correct one may be a little more difficult. Have a look with the package manager and see what packages are installed. Distros naming conventions can be difficult to sort out, exactly what you have. You could try a command like 'rpm -qa | grep nvidia' to list all packages with the word nvidia in them. I would guess that should be a starting point.

You could install the driver directly from nVidia. They are all there. I found that to be messy with Mandriva, a system that uses a rpm based package manager. Mandriva installs proprietary drivers, and they need to be completely removed, if not, the nVidia driver (from nVidia) would not install properly. I can't comment on Fedora on how difficult that may be.

If you have the system installed now, cut and paste the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file here. We can have a look to see if there is anything obviously wrong.

Installing FC 9 may be the easy way out. The newer the install, the better the hardware detection is, the more likely you get the correct driver for your card, and it configures correctly.

You could also have a look in the log file for xorg. On my system it is in /var/log/ and the file name is Xorg.0.log. Do a 'startx' from a command prompt. If the server crashes, then look in the log for errors. They may give you a clew. Also, the server will output to the console that you start it from. Messages there can help.

Post as much info as you can find... hope this helps.

Like i said I have no GUI so all i have is the text only mode. I also do not have internet hook up to the new computer so Im on a laptop sitting next to the linux box. So This isn't a copy and paste but a transcription over to here so i hope i didn't make mistakes. here goes :

# Xorg configuration creaded by pyxf86config

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Indentifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us+inet"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nv"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
Subsection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection


I transcribed this over out of VI. I double checked to see if I made any mistakes but who knows I might have missed something. Thanks for taking the time. Hopefully this can tell you something about the problem.

O.K., two things jump out. Note the line Driver "nv" nv is not the proprietary driver. It should give you a working display, but will not support any of the good stuff the nvidia drivers will. One thing you can try, edit this file, as root. You will have to use vi or vim, or any editor that will run with out the desktop. Change the Driver "nv" to Driver "nvidia". That should load the nvidia proprietary driver; if it is installed.

Do you have a section like this?
If not, try to add it, this section is at the top of the file.

The last thing I can think of, if there is a line anywhere for direct rendering, it needs to be removed.
It should be an Option "dri" ( if I can remember right ). There is a lot of information on nVidias web site of getting their drivers going. This is a link to nVidia, and their latest driver for linux.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Thanks. I have tried changing the 'nv' to 'nvidia' however that did not work. I got x server error telling me no drivers exist. I'll have to check into the other two things you said today. Thanks for your help!

well Fedora 9 is also a no go. It does the same exact thing as Fedora 8. I am on an old 15" CRT monitor while doing this. My main computer has a 19" LCD panel thats only a little over a year old. Perhaps changing out my monitor would help, I'll have to try it, it couldn't hurt i suppose. Maybe with a higher resolution screen I won't get resolution issues. If that doesn't work I'll have to try working on adding that section to Xorg.conf and checking the Nvidia website.

EDIT: Nope its not the monitor. Didn't think it would be. So it must be the video drivers.

EDIT: The "Module" Section didn't change anything. It didn't hurt anything either though so I'm leaving it for now. And no There is nothing resembling something for direct rendering. The Xorg.conf that I gave in my second post is all that was in my xorg.conf. I'm not sure if thats a small amount or if thats a normal size Xorg.conf. But I transcribed every line from my xorg.conf.

What I did was download the Nvidia Drivers to a flashdrive. However I'm not sure which of them are the one I want to install and I have no Idea how to access a USB flash drive in text only mode.

There is a list of supported devices in a README file with each driver. If you can figure it out, then post the results of 'lspci -v' ( I know that is not so easy on a command prompt only ) from that I can take a look and try to determine which driver is the correct one.

I was guessing when I asked you to try 'nvidia' I wanted to know if FC8 had nvidia drivers in the loaded system It would appear no is the answer. That should make it easier to install the correct driver from nVidia.

The flash drive should mount as an hard drive. The problem is to try and figure out which /dev it is. My guess, if you have IDE hard drives, the USB will be sda, so 'mount /dev/sda /mountpoint'. The directory /mountpoint has to exist, you can call it anything you want. Once mounted, do a change directory to the file(s) you want, and copy them to your hard drive.

I don't think your monitor has anything to do with the problem, so use the one that makes it easy for you.

The nVidia site has information on how to install the driver, and how to configure it.

OP, are you aware whether the 7800GT is the AGP or PCI-E version?

I installed Fedora Core 9 today and it runs fine with my 7800GT, I didn't even need to install any addiditional drivers FYI, my 7800 is the PCI-E version

Yeah Mine is the PCI-E 16x version. And thank you camorri I'll give those sugestions a shot and post back when I can. Thanks for the help I really appreciate it.

I'm back after a really long break. I haven't had time to really work with the linux system since I last posted. Anyway I downloaded the nvidia driver and plugged in my USB and logged in as root. Then I did
'mount /dev/sda /mountpoint' and I got a message saying:

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

This is my latest problem. I haven't been able to locate my USB drive.

I also tried 'mount /dev/sda1 /mountpoint' and got the message saying:

mount: mount point /mountpoint does not exist


PS. The title of this post was supposed to read "I'm Back" I don't know how it ended up looking so garbled. I must be more tired than i think.

Alright I took some pictures of the problem screens with my camera. I cant do screen captures so this is the best I got. Could someone please tell me what the allowed image hosting services are for this website. I'll upload the pictures and see if maybe that gives people a better Idea of whats going on.

Thanks.

Ok I just heard something. I dunno if anyone else has heard of this issue. The person who told me didn't give me much detail and I can't really find much online. He said that there is a bug with the Nvidia 7 Series. He said something about VESA. I don't know what VESA is but I get some results pertaining to Linux and Some pertaining to Nvidia. I haven't really seen too much on them together. Perhaps this could be my problem. Since im running the Nvidia 7800 GT. Some of you said you installed with no problems whatsoever so i dont really know. I was also thinking that it could perhaps be a problem with my motherboard chipset. Since thats an nforce 4 motherboard. I don't know. I also can't figure out how to get my USB drive to mount. I use this command to mount.

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/mountpoint

Then I do:

# cd /mnt/mountpoint
# ls

and i get these files:

config-2.6.23.1-42.fc8, initrd-2.6.23.1-42.fc8.img, System.map-2.6.23.1-42.fc8, grub, lost+found, vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8

I dunno maybe I'm doing something wrong.
Also let me know what imagehost to use to put these pictures up. maybe that will give some insight into the problem.

thanks

Did you get any system response to this command? If you did not, that is good, if you did get a response, then something is not working.

If you can list files on the /mnt/mountpoint then you are mounted.

If you edit your /etc/fstab file, and make an entry there, then your mount command is much simpler. It will also mount
when you boot, assuming the device is plugged in.

Nope no system response. Just pops up a new line for the next command.

Ok I finally had success! Heres the problem. Apparently there is a bug with the Nvidia Geforce 7 series cards and the "nv" driver that linux loads to start. If you edit the xorg.conf file so that the "nv" reads "vesa" instead you can then reboot and then run #init 5 and your good to go. Then just change the file inittab so that your default runlevel is now 5!!! I really hope this helps anyone else who may come across this problem. Thanks for all the help. And who knows the battle may not be over yet. I still have to patch my gfx drivers. We'll see how things go.