New Video Card, upgrade to fedora 6
 

Hello,
I am currently using FC3 and just got a new video card to use with windows for gaming. of course, when I switch the cards linux goes bonkers and doesn't know what to do and I'm stuck at a graphic prompt, leaving me just as clueless.
So, seeing as I have the new hardware and an old OS, can I install fedora 6 to recognize the card (it is a GEforce7800)? If I do are there options in Fedora to upgrade from 3.0 so I don't loose all my data on the upgrade (it is onDVDs right now but I'd hate the hassle of migrating the stuff over).

Right now my mail is setup through thunderbird and I'd like that to keep working (along with my other settings and programs) when/if I upgrade.

Any suggestions?

Thanks alot,
~Mark

I've never upgraded my RedHat / FC system - it seems it causes too much problems for too many people. I usually format the disk and reinstall from scratch.

As regards the video card question and going from FC3 to FC6, I recently did exactly this. I went from a 6800LE based Nvidia card to a 7950GT, while going from FC3 to FC6 at the same time.

When you install FC6, it won't detect your card but mine ran fine for the graphical installer as a VESA emulated card. As soon as you have FC6 installed and working, you simply need to download the latest Nvidia Linux unified driver, and compile and install that and your card should work perfectly in X under FC6. Are you going to compile a custom kernel? If you are you'll also need to recompile the Nvidia driver for that particular kernel.

Note that the above assumes that you won't be using yum / livna to get the driver. I had to compile the driver myself because I immediately recompiled the kernel to have CIFS (Samba) support which the stock FC6 kernel does not have, and which I had to have in my kernel.

If you have problems feel free to mail me at spamnot@<removethis>.polard.com, I'd be happy to help you get your card going under FC6. It is really not that hard, but it took me a good few hours to figure out a procedure that works (at least for me).

Regards,

Thanks for the response. I hear that all the time...to never upgrade that is. So what do you all do with your existing stuff like panel settings, theme, e-mail, and preferences for existing softgware? Do you just spend a whole day setting all that up again? I've copied all the . folders out of my home directory in the nieve hopes that just placing them back in the new install will work. Is that a fruitless endeavor? provided I place them in the new subfolders of upgraded programs if they exist

OK, now the second part. Will I still get x windows working on the first install of FC6 before I put the nvidia driver on there? what I am scared of is installing the software then being stuck with just the command prompt. At which point I would have just screwed myself as I don't know how to get the driver from the command prompt (yum maybe? I don't know).

Happy New year
~Mark

Yep, at least I do it that way.

No I don't think that's fruitless at all. You'll just need to make sure you install all the apps you want before copying your home folders back - to ensure that installing an app after you copied its . directory back or whatever, that the app does not maybe clear its directory when it starts up / or you stop it and it saves settings.

You should. It seems to me that all Nvidia based GFX cards have no problems running in VESA /SVGA emulation mode for Anaconda, the linux installer. You should thus be able to install FC6 using its graphical installer, while the card runs in VESA / generic SVGA mode, and then boot into it in GUI mode (runlevel 5). You'll need to switch down to runlevel 3 though, to compile / install or compile and install the Nvidia driver after FC6 is installed.

I had one problem regarding the above when doing my FC6 install - the installer worked fine, but for some reason it set a screen refresh rate my monitor couldn't handle. When I booted into FC6 the first time, my Phillips 107S complained that it could not reach the refresh rate, and all I had was a black screen. I had to use the FC6 rescue disk to get into my system and set the runlevel to 3 (text mode) so I could install the driver. But I'm pretty sure you have a different monitor, so you should not have this problem.

This won't happen, or at least, it should only happen if your installation of the Nvidia driver fails. Which won't be likely to happen if you just use the standard FC6 kernel version and upgrade / install the Nvidia driver via livna / yum. Even if you decide to compile the driver yourself, FC6 seems to have its kernel sources etc correctly setup and you shouldn't have problems compiling the driver against the stock FC6 kernel.

Well, I've got a second PC here and I downloaded the driver on there, burned it to CD, and physically carried it over to my command-prompted FC6 box. I then copied the driver off the CD to the HDD on the Linux machine and installed it from there. That gave me back my GUI, and then I set up my network.

Its really not that hard and I'm pretty sure you'll get it working!

Regards,

Hey thanks a lot,
I gotta try it tomorrow (wanted to wait for your response and it's too late now to start) but I'll let you know how it goes. I figure if I end up at the command prompt I still have by dual boot to get the driver from windows.

Thanks again,
~Mark