Fedora 4 on Dell Optiplex GX270 Graphics Hangs after update;

[Amadeus W. M.]

On Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:47:15 +0100, Mirco Scaramucci wrote:

> Hello guys,
> For the first time I have been experiencing a vey weird problem with my 
> system which is a Dell Optiplex GX270 Pentium 4 2.60Ghz, 64Mb Intel 82865G 
> integrated graphics, Cmedia CMi8738 sound card.
> I have installed Fedora 4 several times and never experienced this problem 
> before.
> Everything is fine during installation and all runs fine until I perform a 
> kernel update and complete update via yum.
> I am actually using the yum.conf downlaod from the fedorafaq.org website 
> which has always worked perfectly for me.
> Only the last couple of times I had to reinstall Fedora after the updates I 
> rebooted my machine to log into the new kernel which I think was the 
> 2.6.12-1447.
> I didn't pay too much attention to the other updates so I do not know wheher 
> the Xorg configuration was being updated as well.
> I did not enable any particular repo during the yum update just a basic yum 
> update from basic repos.
> After rebooting the machine the kernel gets loaded into ram, udev starts and 
> after finishing loading the graphical screen attempts to load but 
> unsuccessfully as all teh colours are scrambled and I get blue and red lines 
> all over the screen and the boot crashes there.
> This problem never occured before during the 10 .000 times I installed 
> fedora.
> I tried to install othe verious distros to find out whether it was a problem 
> with my graphics card but they all worked fine even teh the 3D feature 
> enabled.
> I also tested verious 3D games and they all worked fine.
> Has anyone experineced anything like it/
> Is there any updates I should avoid installing to safeguard the 
> configuration.
> Please HELP. fedora is my very favourite distro, I would say the best but I 
> do not seem to be able to jump start this HORREDNOUS PROBLEM.
> 
> 
> Mirco


I'm one of the unfortunate people who upgraded to the latest X, and got an
unusable X server. So last night, at about 2 am I was downgrading the X
server.

I always boot to level 3 (non-graphical), then login and manually startx.
This is precisely for the grim times when the computer has a bad X day. 
At the prompt I installed the original xorg rpms, and, of course, put
the libvgahw.a file from FC3 in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules, as the fix for the
original bad X server bug.

You can boot into level 3 or into single user mode, by modifying the boot
command in grub. Read the grub screens (quickly, before the kernel starts
to boot), to see how to edit the boot command. It's self explanatory. You
need to append e.g. linux single.