I have installed FC5 on an Acer 5024WLMi laptop, I can not get X to work. The display just goes blank, not even a cursor or hour glass. I have googled around and other people seem to have got it working with other distros. I have tried various combinations from the xorg.conf files that they have 'published'. Still no joy.

There are no errors in the logs. Getting into the laptop remotely, KDE would seem to be all up and running, just no display.

Any help, as always, appreciated.

Yea, Fedora Core 5 has known problems with ATi and nVidia video. First thing to do is boot* into runlevel 3 and do some updating;

yum update kernel (this should be done first)
yum update (to get the rest of the updates)

After rebooting the laptop hopefully the video problem is gone, but if not then boot or switch to runlevel 3 (Ctrl+Alt+F1), log on as root and type something like; init 3

Then as root type something like;

system-config-display --reconfigure --set resolution 800x600 --set depth 16

Hopefully this should get you a generic working X configuration. For now it seems that your best bet (since your using the 64-bit OS) is to install the drivers from ATI's web site; http://www.ati.com/

Your laptop is very close to mine (Aspire 5000 series) and for the 1280x800 resolution I have in my xorg.conf file;


If all else fails you can always try to configure your video to use the generic vesa card and driver. You may need to disable the hardware probing by udev and maybe kudzu for the video for this to work.

* In case you need he howto boot into runlevel 3;

When the grub splash screen is displayed press any key.

Select the Fedora Core boot choice and press the 'e' key

Select the line that starts with something like 'kernel /vmlinuz' and press the 'e' key again

At the end of the line add a space followed by the number three (3)

When done press the 'Enter' key followed by the 'b' key

Thanks for the info.

I actually took a slightly different tack last night. I had upgraded eveything via yum but then discovered that there were ATI drivers available from the Livna repo. I followed the instructions on their website and got yum to install the fglrx drivers and 'Hey Presto!' everything works.

Good, I'm glad that the fine folks at Livna got the x86_64 problem licked. The last time I checked they had an error problem with the ATI x86_64 drivers.

I'm also glad that you got the problem resolved, it's nice to have a working GUI configuration.