Fedora 6, Dell Optiplex GX260 and PCI Video

[Charles Gagnon]

I hit Fedoraforum.org with this but got nothing. It has been driving me 
nuts. I searched the net high and low but I cannot put my finger on what 
the problem is.

I have a Dell Optiplex GX260 which I use with Fedora. It currently runs 
an updated 'Fedora Core release 6 (Zod)'. I want to run multihead on it.

When I run with the onboard video adapter (part of the Intel 845G), 
everything works okay. As soon as I try to use my PCI Matrox G2+/QUAD-PL 
(Quad G200 32MB PCI), the kernel will not even unpack, or it crashes 
with a weird EIP error and khelper message right after it tries to load.

I looked at the obvious like trying to disable the onboard video but the 
BIOS has two modes: Onboard or Auto, in auto mode, the onboard video is 
disabled as soon as a second card is sensed in the PCI slot.

A lot of people always mention driver configs and Xorg.conf and such but 
this seems way before all that. It's not like the machine comes up but X 
is unavailable, the kernel crashes and you have to hit the power button.

The setup works fine on other OSs like Windows XP. But I can't even run 
the install procedure with Fedora. If leave the PCI card in, the install 
procedure will crash from the DVD. After I installed correctly and used 
the onboard video for a while, I decided to reinstall the Matrox to give 
it a try but I get the same result.

 From reading other boards, I notice other users seem to have the same 
problems with PCI video cards but I don't know why. I've even seen 
references to similar problems on other flavors of Linux.

If anyone has any idea, please let me know, I'm pulling my hair here. 
I'm hoping there's a miracle kernel patch or maybe a magical IRQ setup I 
need to do. Whatever it is I'll give it a try. The Dell has an AGP slot 
also, do you think an AGP card would give me the same problems?

Thanks.

-- 
Charles Gagnon                   | My views are my views and they
http://unixrealm.com             | do not represent those of anybody
charlesg at unixrealm.com        | but me.