xserver won't start fc5
 

hey, i stayed up till 3:30am last night to install fedora core 5 on my laptop. when the system rebooted everything was fine, i installed a couple of rpms with no problems. so around 3:45 i got tired and went to bed because i had school. today, at school, i booted my laptop and the xserver won't start. i configured my graphics card and display the same way that i had it in fc4. i tried numerous times to restart xserver but it won't let me change my display, it won't even go back to the default settings. so having 4 hours of sleep and looking forward to using fc5 all night, i am not happy. my graphics card is an ati rage mobility and my laptop is a compaq armada m700. btw i reformatted my hard drive when i installed fc5 so i did not upgrade from fc4. any help would be appreciated.
Chase

ATI and NVidia graphics cards are known to be a problem with FC5....

Boot into runlevel and at least get a generic X11 configuration going.

When the grub splash screen is displayed press any key

Select your Fedora Core 5 boot choice and press the 'e' key
Select the line the begins with 'kernel' and press the 'e' key
At the end of the line add a space followed by the number 3
When done press the 'Enter' key followed by the 'b' key
Log on as root and do;

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_mybackup
system-config-display --set resolution 800x600 --set depth 24

You can then test by using; startx

If this looks OK then your done if not then try the system-config-display command again and set the depth to 16


Also read; http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=420876

ok i got to here: "system-config-display --set resolution 800*600 --set depth 24"

now it says: "option --set not a unique prefix"

what does this mean?

ok got i set the depth to 24 and it didn't work, i tried 16 and it gives me:
"Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining."

OK, looks like we need to really reconfigure the xorg.conf file;

system-config-display --reconfig --set resolution 800x600 --set depth 16 --set driver vesa

The error "could not open default font 'fixed'" suggests to me to have a look at your /etc/X11/fs/config file and check the catalogue portion. If the last line has a comma at the end of the line remove the bad extra comma. Also comment out (put the # sign in front of the line) the line if you see one about fixed.

Extra comma bad example;
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,

The fixed example;
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1

ok, i'm just going to try and reinstall fc5 to see what happens then i'll report back.

it works now, this time i didn't install mesa, now i can't connect to the internet though.

I'm glad you got the video working..... Yea!!!!

I'm sad you cannot connect to the Internet :(

I had a similar problem. Installed FC5 using gui but after installation xserver didn't start. I already had FC4 running which helped in resolving my issue.

After numerous hours I finally got xserver to start but only in 800x600.

1. Fresh install of FC5
2. Followed EXACTLY the ATI & NVidia Graphics Acceleration guidance in Stanton-finley.net's FC5 installation guidance.
3. Modified the grub.conf file to include the new kernel and specified that it start in init 3 mode (placed a '3' at the end of the startup line)
4. Restarted PC and selected the new FC5 at start up.
5. After logging in I used the info in Lenard's reply above as modified below.
system-config-display --reconfig --set-resolution=800x600 --set-depth=16 --set-driver=vesa

I am up and running but only in 800x600 resolution.