Starting Fedora Core 4 in Failsafe

dudeman41465 · 04-03-2006, 01:06 AM

How would I go about starting Fedora Core 4 in a failsafe terminal? I need to not start X, but that's not an option on the interactive startup thing. I need the terminal only without X so I can install the right drivers for my video card. There's no option in Grub to start in failsafe only.

spooon · 04-03-2006, 01:54 AM

You want to start in runlevel 3. (The Failsafe terminal is not relevant; it is a terminal emulator in X.) To do this permanently, you can edit your /etc/inittab and change the line that says "id:5:initdefault:" to "id:3:initdefault:". If you only need to do it one time, append a "3" to the kernel arguments in GRUB (press the "a" key). I think you can also change runlevel as root with "telinit 3" or something.

dudeman41465 · 04-03-2006, 02:09 AM

Cool, I got it working, but apparently the Nvidia drivers, even the ones directly from nvidia.com, only work with kernel version 2.6.15 and older, and I'm running 2.6.16. I'll just have to wait for an updated one, it doesn't look bad, I can't tell anything, it's just that if I try to do anything graphics intensive at all, like anything with OpenGL, it runs remarkably slow. Guess I'm switching back to the Windows drive for gaming and stuff for a while.

spooon · 04-03-2006, 02:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dudeman41465

Cool, I got it working, but apparently the Nvidia drivers, even the ones directly from nvidia.com, only work with kernel version 2.6.15 and older, and I'm running 2.6.16. I'll just have to wait for an updated one, it doesn't look bad, I can't tell anything, it's just that if I try to do anything graphics intensive at all, like anything with OpenGL, it runs remarkably slow. Guess I'm switching back to the Windows drive for gaming and stuff for a while.

What? I am using 2.6.16-1.2080_FC5 and my Nvidia drivers work fine.

You should install them from Livna. For FC4, add Livna and do "yum install kernel-module-nvidia-$(uname -r)". Browsing Livna, they do have drivers for 2.6.16-1.2069_FC4, so it certainly does work with 2.6.16.

dudeman41465 · 04-03-2006, 02:41 AM

Ok, I'll try it again, I tried it once just like that, I've got the patched yum configuration, and it tried to install 2.6.15 as a dependency, then errored out and told me the kernel I had was newer than the one it wanted to install. Here's exactly what I typed in konsole:

Code:

yum install nvidia-glx 2.6.16-1.2069_FC4-nvidia-$(uname -r)

dudeman41465 · 04-03-2006, 02:51 AM

Now I get this error:

Error: Missing Dependency: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4 is needed by package kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4