No GUI After Install & No firstboot...

safetycopy · 11-23-2008, 10:45 PM

Hi All

I'm trying to install Fedora 9 and having some problems.

Installation went fine... Nice GUI and everything...

After successful installation, I reboot and now get a GRUB menu (although it lists Fedora and 'other' rather than explicitly listing 'Windows').

When I select Fedora, I get a bunch of text, with messages along the lines of 'Starting... [OK]'. Towards the bottom of these messages I get something to do with nVidia/xserver (I have a GeForce4 MX420 video card) and [FAILED]... It goes too fast for me to read the exact message. At this point I get the root logon and then the bash shell.

After running 'startx' I get this error message:

Code:

Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server.
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

I've been trying to do a little more research and came across http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=203190. A lot of the posts were over my head, but I thought I'd try a couple of the commands to try and get some useful info for you to look at.

First off... Once Fedora boots, I get:

Code:

Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)
Kernel 2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 on an i686 (tty1)

localhost login:

For the first few seconds the screen flickers a lot, then settles down.

I tried 'system-config-display --reconfig' and got:

Code:

Couldn't start X server on card 0
Couldn't start X server on card 1
Error, failed to start X server.

Then I tried 'cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf' and got:

Code:

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 don't know if it's relevant or not, but my motherboard has an onboard Intel graphics chip, and then I have my nVidia GeForce4 MX 420 PCI card. Maybe this is the reason for card0 and card1?

I currently don't have any internet access from Fedora (I'm on a wireless network, which will be next on my list of stuff to get working once I can get the firstboot to work!), so I can't download anything. Obviously, I have internet access from my Windows install (same machine) at the moment :-)

I'm a linux/CLI newbie, so any assistance will need to be in a 'For Dummies' style! :-)

safetycopy · 11-24-2008, 07:24 AM

Well, still no progress really... After spending the day messing around, something made me unhook my monitor from the nvidia card and hook it directly to the motherboard instead. Guess what? All the previous errors Fedora gave me were gone and it worked fine.

Obviously, the question now is 'will my video card work with Fedora?'

I'll get back on it all as soon as I've had some sleep - I've run out of patience today! :-(

safetycopy · 11-24-2008, 07:15 PM

So now when I boot into Fedora I just get the CLI... How do I get my nVidia card working from here?

safetycopy · 11-24-2008, 11:09 PM

From what I've gathered, an install of http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d..._96.43.07.html might help with my problem, so I went ahead and downloaded that and burned it to CD.

After much messing about, I managed to copy the driver file into my user's home/Desktop directory, however, upon running the file as root I get this error message:

Code:

ERROR: Unable to find the system utility 'ld'; please make sure you have the package 'binutils' installed. If you do have binutils installed, then please check that 'ld' is in your PATH.

Any idea how I can get the 'binutils' package installed with no internet access from Fedora? I am able to download and burn CDs on a Windows machine, so maybe I can do it that way?