Installed fedora 8 on virtual pc 2007, xp pro sp2.

fedora starts fine but when login screen comes up, you cant even read
what is on the screen due to garbled 16 color video.

I assume its due to my xp running ati x850xt at 1280x1024?

This is my first dive in to unix, grub is my boot loader.

Any help much appreciated!

I have only played a little with virtual machines, but I don't think it's your windows settings that's causing these problems. More likely it's the settings for the virtual machine and its display unit (ie. the virtual screen) that is the problem.

- Findus

You should be able to use Ctrl+Alt+F{1-6} to bring up a "virtual console" in text mode. That will allow you to log in and make some changes to config files.

Once you've gotten to the console and logged in (same username and password as the graphical interface), you can edit /etc/inittab so that your default runlevel is 3 instead of 5. That will boot you in to the console and not start the X server.

Then you can begin to troubleshoot your video settings.

Check /var/log/message for errors that happened when the X server started.

The video settings are in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You can change the default resolution and color depth there as needed.

I'd also suggest checking the ATI website for linux compatible drivers for your video card. That might make things a whole lot easier for you.

Check for the below option in xorg.conf

Source: http://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.8.0/doc/xorg.conf.5.html

I recently came across a post where this was mentioned in combination with an ATI card.