Just recently, I bought and installed an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card. Afterwards, Linux booted up and told me that a video card was changed, and selected a generic, Radeon 9800 driver. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but immediately after that, Fedora Core 1 came up waiting for a user name and password, but refused to load KDE, or any other GUI, even the failsafe mode. It would just lock up. If there's a way to just boot to a non-graphical command prompt, I could probably install the ATI approved drivers, but I have no idea how to boot to a command prompt. Any help would be appreciated.

I don't know anything about RH, but in Slack there is a default runlevel of 3 (console login). Runlevel 4 is the X window manager login. If you can tell it to go directly to runlevel 3 at boot you should be able to at least get to your console.

I bought the 9800 Pro last year for $212 on sale.

Thought I was getting a good deal as the card outperforms the Nvidia 4600 according to the benchmarks...

But that performance is in Windows only, as ATi's drivers are windows-centric.

ATi's Linux 3d drivers are ludicrously hard to install, though possible. And I am talkin' about the command line interface...

Upon TESTING the card's after I installed the drivers, performance was EQUAL to the Nvidia 4600.

They're buggy as halliburton as well, Unreal Tournament 2003 showed goofy distortions after a while.

They're not worth the time and effort. I had read ATi's official instructions and they were wrong. I found 3 sources on the internet discussing enabling 3D support, and had to make a hodgepodge of each for it to work.

Get a BFG o/c or PNY Verto brand Nvidia GeForce 5900FX instead and dump ATi and their pathetic attempt to make a Linux driver. Those Nvidia 5900 cards cost $200 (or less now, thanks to the new awesome 6800 series) - it's comparatively easy to install (reading the directions and following them does what they say they will do, unlike ATi's little hack-job) and it FLIES under Linux.

Yikes.

You know, when people mention they're having a problem, and someone responds "Company A sucks. Use company B!", it's niether productive, necessary, nor wanted in a lot of cases. It's akin to telling everyone on this board "Linux sucks, go use Windows!"

Slacker: I'll try to get it into runlevel 3, though I'm not sure how I'm going to do that.

Thanks for the help, Slacker. I've got it working now.