Fedora 6, Dell Optiplex GX260 and PCI Video

[Phil Meyer]

Charles Gagnon wrote:
> 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.

This is a unique (in my experience) to DELL Optiplex video BIOS issue 
that is solvable.

In the DELL BIOS, you need to set the video priority from AUTO to on 
board video.

The Fedora kernels try to resolve the primary video for several reasons, 
and some other distro kernels do not, unless you build the fb, and 
other, modules into the kernel.

The problem is that the AUTO setting will offer the wrong video card to 
the kernel as the default, causing the kernel to crash.

Good luck!