Fedora 6, Dell Optiplex GX260 and PCI Video

[Charles Gagnon]

But that will work if I have the PCI card in but I want to use the 
OnBoard video right?

What if I want to use the Matrox PCI card? THe BIOS offers no option to 
disable the OnBoard video.

And the PCI card does work, I get the Dell logo at the beginining then 
the Fedora grub boot menu, finally I see a couple of line of kernel 
stuff and than the crash.

Or am I misunderstanding the meaning of OnBoard and Auto?

Phil Meyer wrote:
> 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.
> 

-- 
Charles Gagnon                   | My views are my views and they
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