buut paramerers for seeing the verbose boot process

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 04/08/2011 09:04 PM, JD wrote:
> On 04/08/2011 05:39 PM, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
>> On 04/08/2011 04:23 PM, JD wrote:
>>> On 04/08/2011 12:29 AM, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
>>> I looked! I have not rhgb and no quiet.
>> OK, then you have a different problem then.
>>
>>> What happens is at boot, there is a fast scroll
>>> of text and suddenly, the screen appears as if it got powered off,
>>> but it also behaves that way when switching from bios text mode
>>> to graphics mode. It stays blank  (black) for about 2.5 or more minutes
>>> and then the Gnome login menu pops up.
>>> I never get to see the output of the boot process,
>>> so I can see what passed and what failed.
>> Sounds to me like it may be a video related problem with the card
>> switching modes during boot up.  Do you have a VGA= on your kernel line?
> No. Here is the entry in grub.conf
> title Fedora (2.6.38.2.fc14.i686)
>          root (hd0,1)
>          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.2.fc14.i686 ro root=/dev/sda2 
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
>          initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.38.2.fc14.i686.img
> 
>> You might try putting a "nomodeset" and see what it does, but that
>> option is becoming deprecated as the kernel support for various video
>> cards improves.
> I used to have nomodeset. But that had the effect of slowing
> down switching from one workspace to the next a lot -
> like it would 2.5 to 3 seconds for the switch-to  workspace
> would display all it's contents. So, an OP advised me to remove
> it, and that indeed fixed that problem. So, not sure I would
> want to get back to that "slowdown" - but I will try it just
> to test.

I was only suggesting it as a way for you to see the messages.  I was
hoping we could try and figure out what was happening when it mode
switches and the screen disappears....

> It is  the Radeon Mobility 9600 M10.
> I assume that the F14 Xserver driver is picked
> automatically. There is no /etc/X11/xorg.conf

OK, that should be using the stock "ati" driver.  I'm using the same
driver for my Mobility Radeon X1600 without the problems you are seeing.

Try and see if you can find a file in /var/log/Xorg.0.log

It is your X11 log file and should contain *much* information that could
be useful in debugging your problem....

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)