New Install FC6 x86_64 with X1300 - won't run first time

[louisvd]

Hi. After patting myself on the back for buying a new PC at last I decided I would run FC6 x86_64 on it. I completed the graphical installation. Afterwards it wanted to reboot. Then the first time startup should appear. However, the PC switches to the graphical screen and shows nothing. My monitor shows the running "Knight Rider" LED's. It stays like this no matter how long I leave it. If I CTRL-ALT-F1 I get the text startup screen which stops at "enabling fstab/swap" or something like that. I can CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot, but that's all I can do. If I add a kernel parameter to GRUB (by pressing a) and add a number or single, it makes NO difference. I suspect the graphics card drivers.

ATI Radeon Sapphire X1300
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
ECS Nforce A939 motherboard

Any ideas?

[Michael]

By graphical install do you mean of the ATI drivers? If so, you need to use --buildpkg Fedora/FC6 and NOT the graphical installer. See other threads in this forum that detail the exact process.

[louisvd]

By graphical install do you mean of the ATI drivers? If so, you need to use --buildpkg Fedora/FC6 and NOT the graphical installer. See other threads in this forum that detail the exact process.

Thanks for the reply. OK, just so I understand ...
I installed by booting the DVD and pressing enter, thus the "graphical installation" method. That took me through the installation process. At the end of installing the packages it reboots. After that, when the box had to come up for the first time, the screen switches over to GUI mode (monitor clicks) and then nothing displays on the screen. I can switch to the text screen but there is no login process yet. (Perhaps because the first time run has not yet completed.) If I modify the grub kernel parameters by adding a runlevel (press 'a') this is ignored and it still tries to switch to the GUI.

So the only way I can get to the system is to boot the DVD with linux rescue, and then chroot /mnt/sysimage. What do you suggest I do? Install the ATI drivers from the rescue mode? From looking at the installation HOWTO on the ATI/AMD site, it appears that it needs the GUI to install -- I may be wrong here.

Thanks in advance for your reply ...

[Michael]

From looking at the installation HOWTO on the ATI/AMD site, it appears that it needs the GUI to install -- I may be wrong here.

No. Their graphical installer only works on X.Org 6.8.2. You need to run the driver by doing:

./ati-driver-name.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6.

[louisvd]

No. Their graphical installer only works on X.Org 6.8.2. You need to run the driver by doing:

./ati-driver-name.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6.

Thanks for that pointer.

What a MISSION to fix!!

For others out there who may go through this, let me assist by detailing my saga.

I had to boot into linux rescue mode with my FC6 disk. I edited /etc/inittab so my initdefault was 3, not 5. This allowed a text-based firt-time boot to take place. After this I could log in normally. I don't know if kernel-xen-devel was needed (the installer automatically chose the xen kernel). In a previous attempt at installing the ati drivers I installed the devel package even though the headers one already was there. I then had to install the qt-devel package because it wanted /etc/profile.d/qt.sh. Then it moaned about the fireglcontrolpanel not being able to be built. After performing the following symbolic link: ln -s /usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib /usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib64 it compiled all the rpms successfully. It still wouldn't install the rpms because it wanted libstdc++.so.5. To get this I had to install compat-libstdc++-33. Once that was there, the drivers installed and I could run startx and change the initdefault value back to 5 in my /etc/inittab.

... and the Desktop Effects won't enable. But now I know what to do when the next driver is out - hopefully with the Desktop Effects enabled!

Thanks Phoronix for the assistance.

[Michael]

The installation scripts will be updated in 8.35 so that it's easier, and you won't need to go to those extents again since you don't need to reinstall qtr-devel or any other RPMs.

Desktop effects support will be here with time.

Your welcome.