S3 Prosavage PN133 Video issue during installation (Delia Leal)

[Paul Dubinsky]

At 01:49 PM 2/17/2004, you wrote:


>Message: 9
>Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:16:14 -0800
>From: Delia Leal <delia.leal at sri.com>
>Subject: S3 Prosavage PN133 Video issue during installation
>To: fedora-list at redhat.com
>Reply-To: fedora-list at redhat.com
>
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>Fedora Core 1 recognizes that my Winsystems EBC motherboard has an
>integrated S3 Prosavage PN133 Video card during the hardware autodetect
>portion of installing Fedora, but it won't install Fedora in graphical
>mode.  I get a black screen.  CLT-ALT-F1 says that X-server started, but ..
>
>Does anyone know if the PN133 card is supported by Fedora?

The short answer: sort of. I (and many others) have had the same problem. 
The solution to the problem, shown by Peter Barker of Florida Atlantic 
University , is to add then following line:

         Option      "UseBIOS" "off"

to the device section of the XF*^Config file in the /etc/X11 directory. As 
below:

Section "Device"
         Identifier  "Videocard0"
         Driver      "savage"
         VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
         BoardName   "S3 ProSavage KM133"
         Option      "UseBIOS" "off"
EndSection

The problem, of course, is how to get to the /etc/X11 directory if you have 
a black screen and no command line. The solution is to put the box on a 
network and use OpenSSH to get to the command line. Login is as root, get 
to /etc and change inittab to have the default run level set to 3 not 5. 
You can also go to /etc/X11 and add the Option line to the XF86Config file. 
In either case, finish up with:

shutdown -r now

and you should be in business after the reboot.

It would nice if Fedora's installer asked which runlevel you wanted on the 
first boot. That would really make things a lot easier. Earlier RedHat 
distros had just that question: text or graphical login?

Any more questions, just ask.

Regards,
Paul



"We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do,
and we seem to do it about every ten minutes."
         J. William Fulbright , quoted in Time (New York, Feb. 4, 1952).


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