Redhat 9 video problems installing
 

when attempting to install redhat 9 as the installation attempts to go into graphical mode, my monitor decides that it doesn't like the horizontal sync (at least that's what i can gather)
it picks my geforce fx 5600 up as a generic vesa card. it detects my monitor correctly as a v770+

i decided to use text installer, which worked perfectly. the next problem came when the X logon screen tried to initiate. the text based logon screen appeared then was interrupted by constant attempts to start the x windows system.

any ideas that could help me sort this out?

anyone know of a program that will probe my monitor properly to find out it's vsync and hsync rates? (preferably one that works under windowz xp *cringes*)

well, look at the /etc/inittab file.

there is a starting runlevel for the system. i can't remember exactly what the line says and not at home right now to check.

you will see like should be comment that says something about starting runlevel. it will probably say 5

that is the problem. before changing you can tell me where you see the number 5 in the file and i will tell you which to change. i may be wrong. so don't change til you check back. it should be 3 though that will give you text login to start, then we can try changing to generic monitor or something. maybe generic monitor that can do 800x600 at like 56Hz would be a good place to start. then go from there.

will be looking so can help best i can. i may be totally off so don't do anything hastily.

it doesn't matter if i need to reinstall it a few more times...

i did however find a copy of some nvidia drivers and managed to install them to get the xwindows running... unfortunatly it suffers from another problem now related to those drivers... i'm presently at nvidias site grabbing 2 or 3 different versions to try. the problem it now has is video (meaning actual os output to video card) moves for 2 seconds then pauses for 1. different drivers should sort that out tho.

unfortunatly in order to install these drivers i had to do an interactive startup and skip the firstrun startup (and the one that checks for new hardware for some reason. wierd?)

i guess that everytime i reinstall i'll have to have an extra cd there for my graphics card drivers... unusual considering it's in the list of cards it can recognise... oh... there is a possibility that it didn't pick it up on the amount of memory it has on it tho... it's a 256 mb version of the fx 5600 (if that helps anywhere)
i did notice that the highest option in the non-updated redhat 9 is 128 mb.

no biggy there... so long as it works now all will be fine. thanks for looking out for me tho. hope this can help someone else out there if they have a similar problem.

Well, I too am having the exact same problem as this guy, but I am not versed enough in Linux to change drivers in the command prompt (Runlevel 3). Could you help me with this? I have an Asylum Geforce 4 FX 5600 w/ 256 MB of video memory. I know I'll need some new drivers from nVidia, but I need to know to install them properly under the text prompt. Thanks.

Edit: And while I'm here, can I triple boot WinXP, RedHat 9, and some other Linux distro? I figure it's possible, but, again, how would I set up the bootloader to do this correctly? Bootloader is GRUB.

Alright, I have the drivers (IA32) for my nvidia card. Only problem is that I can't actually get the file somewhere I can install it. Both the network card driver (from Intel) and the nvidia driver can't be accessed on my windows partition from Redhat for some reason (ie, there's not a windows mounted until /mnt/). Also, although there is a /mnt/cdrom/, when I put a CD in (CD-R burned data disc), nothing shows up. There are no errors, nothing. How can I get around this? Need some help badly so I can get started here.

For anyone who may be concerned, I figured out how to mount the CD drive with the CD in it properly from another thread. RH9 is now up and running successfully. Only big thing is to figure out how to add a user that's not root and be able to login.

have a look for a windows program called Ext2FS Anywhere by paragon software... i used it to modify all the files in windows as i couldn't remember the text editors in command level linux :-/ It alows you to mount the linux formatted partitions into windows.

it does slow down the startup of windows tho... but it does work.

as for adding a user, if you are using kde, there is a section in the KDE Control Center that allows you to add users... this may come from an inexperienced user so i can't guarantee that it will be there... i think i saw it there :-\