Dell Inspiron 1100 and Intel 82845 video problems

[Kevin Cummings]

A week or so ago, I came into this Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop, and I boot
it with the Fedora 17 Live CD.  The system booted, but fell into Gnome 3
Fallback mode.  At least the system runs, so I installed to Hard-Disk.

when it rebooted, I started to have graphics problems.  X either failed
to start, or it presented me a completely black login screen (I'm not
sure which).  Through some finagling, I was able to login on a Console
Terminal, and I got my WiFi dongle working (The ethernet cable had been
also working).  I was then able to run yum for all the updates.  Great!
 Now I have 2 kernels installed:  3.3.4-5 from the live CD and 3.8.4-102
from updates.  Now I *still* can't get a visible graphical login to display.

After some more playing with the /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file, I was able
to make the following changes:

	Changed the system font from TRUE to a real font name.
	Changed the gfxpayload=keep to 832x624.

Now, when I boot either the 3.3.4 kernel, or the 3.3.4 recovery kernel,
I have a graphical login screen (at 1024x768 resolution).

But, If I try and boot any of the 3.8.4 kernel entries (with the same
changes that work for the 3.3.4 boot), I can see a mouse cursor
(sometimes in a "subset" of the full screen) that seems to work, but no
other visible indication that X is running.

Now, here's the kicker:  If I position the mouse to where my userid
would be listed near the middle of the login screen, click, then wait a
couple of seconds, then type my password, My X11 session starts to
appear.  But, not everything displays perfectly.  There are lot's of
"dropouts" in the menu texts.  For example, there is no visible text on
the XFCE applications pulldown (it should say: Applications).  In
Thunderbird, the top menu bar says:  "F   ", "Ed  ", "V  w", "O_     "
etc   The text in the title bar is OK, as is the text I type in this
compose message window.  But, the Task Manager buttons are also
incomplete (one of them says "T rm    -r   @kj    3:~").

xrandr lists both the LVDS and the VGA ports at 1024x768, 800x600, &
640x480, and that is running in 1024x768 mode.

Any ideas what's wrong?

I'd prefer to be running the latest kernel over the older LiveCD kernel....

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