RedHat Situation


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Ok, I dumped slack (over my head) so I think, i'll do something nice and easy and install red hat 9.. But I ran into some problems... here's my situation...

During the installation after anaconda it attempts to run Xserver.. but my monitor turns off and stays off so I have to reboot, so I think its just because its detected the wrong driver. I do the non-graphical install, everything runs smooth, afterwards I reboot and the monitor does the exact same thing.

I search online and find out that its my graphics card (geforcefx 5200) and that I would have to install nvidia's drivers. So I burn the nforce2 (for my mobo) drivers and the geforcefx drivers on a cd in Nero. I run the rescue disc and get to root. I mount the cdrom and try to get a directory listing... but it just comes up with a bunch of characters that are not readable. I burn the cd as a multisession disc.. but I was told that shouldn't effect it.

I can't get those drivers to that partition.. anyone got any suggestions?

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if you are dual booting you can access the drivers with out buring them to cd. I wouldn't and try to fit it on a floppy, but if you had to you might have to finalize the cd and make it work on any computer.

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I tried closing the cd.. didn't work.. I tried mounting the windows partition..

It says it cannot mount it because it is ntfs...

btw does xf86config not work in redhat???

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ok will do..

But even if I get the drivers how can I run xf86config to change the vid driver?

EDIT: mount_ntfs did not work.

Anyone else have trouble with GeforceFX and Redhat 9?

Edited by Powerworks
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Powerworks,

I had the same peoblem as you during a Fedora installation, except my Montior told me it was being sent an out of range signal.

To get around this I did a text mode install. Never needed to setup X after because the machine is a headless file/web server, but once you have a console at least you can make a start...

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I have the same problems here, I have an ATi radeon 9800 Pro 128Meg and an nForce2 motherboard, setup works fine - detects everything, but when booting for the first time, nothing works, XWindows fails saying it cannot detect the graphics card, loads of errors during bootup saying that stuff like USB/IEE1394 devices couldnt be initialised and others. Surely the various linux distros would have accounted for the nforce2 motherboards now, and also the latest ATi graphics cards.

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they do but video cards are about the hardest things to get to work right. It has taken me 2 weeks to get my mobility radeon 7500 to work. the easiest way to make sure it will work is to compile the kernel with support for your motherboard and your graphics card.

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This shouldn't be a problem really - if it's anything like a Geforce 4 (which works great).

Make sure you don't start Xserver after the install (I'm not sure if you have got this far). Then edit the inittab (/etc/inittab) with nano or your favourite text editor (I'm using nano, which comes with RH9/FC1 as deafult). Set default level to 3 so xserver won't start. Reboot.

Log in as root (should be in text mode), copy the nvidia drivers off CD or even wget them off the internet (assuming your network card works - wget http://path.to/drivers) to your root direcotry.

Now all you need to do is do the usual sh nvidia-drivers-filename.run, install them. Then nano the XF86 config file - /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and change where it says 'nv' to 'nvidia'.

If this doesn't work, you could try using 'vesa' in your XF86 config to use the default-crap-o drivers.

Also, you probably want to use fedora instead of RH9. It will probably make some steps easier.

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one of my friends had the same problem with redhat9 (with similar hardware), we tried fedora and it worked flawlessly. If you want something easy, get fedora...since its already hard to find rpms for redhat9 for the latest software.

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Surely the various linux distros would have accounted for the nforce2 motherboards now, and also the latest ATi graphics cards.

Well, yeah. If the vendor has supplied information about the boards ahead of their release. Or even at all.

In cases where no information is provided to the Open Source community, we have to wait until some coders get the hardware, let them spend time to 'hack' and reverse-engineer it, develop the code, test the code, release the code, the main distros may wait until further tuning is done before releasing it as a standard part of their distro.

Not everything comes quickly. It would be nice if it did! As Linux ganes momentum and market share, these problems should start to fade away.

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Exactly.

One thing I do find anoying about the true free, open source distros is the fact they don't do something like this when you first boot up:

"Welcome to Fedora. We have detected an nVidia card attached to the system. Would you like me to install proprietary Linux drivers for you now - I will download them off the internet for you"

or something. That way you would be not distrubuting evil non-opensource software but you would allow people to easily install drivers.

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Fortunately, things like the nVidia video drivers are common enough that they aren't hard to find.

But, there are things that do require searching for... At least, once you find and install what you need, you are pretty much done. And, I have learned more about computers and networking since running Linux, too! ;)

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I know but to a normal user it's not an easy task - you have to use a text edit, put yourself in init 3 and other stuff. It could be a lot easier if they would just do a simple dialog that could do it for you and then restart the system for you...

PS: 500th post :D.

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Nvidia's drivers have been giving me hell with Fedora Core 1.90 test 1. I go to run level 3, run the installer, it doesn't find a kernel interface but it's able to create one, the kernal complains about being tainted since the nvidia drivers aren't open source, I edit my /etc/X11/XF86Config file to change the driver to 'nvidia' and keep it from loading dbi, reboot, and get stuck with a blank screen. I then reset my computer and edit the kernal startup parameters to go into run level 3 but I find out that sendmail is freezing the system. So I reboot again and go into run level 1 and delete the the sym links at /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S80sendmail and /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S80sendmail to prevent sendmail from freezing the system with the tainted kernal but I still get a blank screen when I try booting in run level 5. This happens with a fresh install of FC 1.90 test 1 with a geforce 3 ti 200 and the 5336 drivers.

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