Hi. I have been having a lot of trouble finding a working video card for Fedora Core 3. I originally had a Magic Video 64 by IO Magic, but that only worked in XFree86 3.3.1, and the support was never ported up to 4 and Xorg. I then acquired an STB Trio64V+. I sent out a query to this mailing list about whether this card works or not. Getting no reply, I downloaded the s3 driver source for Xorg and tried to figure out whether it was supported or not. This was to avoid wasting 2-3 hours on an install to see whether it worked or not. The code was too complicated, and although there was driver code for that chip, it was not clear if the code was in the execution path. So, I ended up having to waste 2-3 hours installing Fedora Core 3, only to find that the STB Trio64V+ was not compatible, since it crashed during the boot, probably when trying to bring up the X server. I then bought a Matrox Millennium II. It worked right away, but it was very unstable. Xorg would not stay up more than a few hours, and occasionally would crash in 5 minutes or so. It usually crashed while browsing web, but it even crashed when working on an xterm, which should not be graphically very demanding. It also always crashed when I logged out of my userid (the Actions menu). It was almost bearable to work with, but the machine crahsned 6 times per day, compared to my Windows 2000 machine which only crashes once or twice a week. Or my RedHat 7.2 machine, which crashes once or twice a month. This was the Linux BSOD type crash, requiring a power cycle. I then wised up a bit, and decided to buy two cards at a time. I bought an Diamond S3 Virge card with 4MB and a ATI Graphics Pro Turbo Mach64 card. The S3 Virge card had an interesting problem. The monitor scanning would return garbage characters instead the true name of the monitor. I knew what the monitor's name was, since the Matrox scan found it correctly. After a lot of thinking, I realized that the automatic xorg configuration was corrupting the xorg.conf file with the garbage monitor name characters, and the Xorg server was choking in them. I got the clever idea to write the file with the Matrox card, and then, in rescue mode, put the correct monitor definition from the newly prepared file into the xorg.conf for the S3 Virge. That did it! The S3 Virge gave a graphical login. And, no more crashes during logout! But, there was another problem. The machine would usually BSOD crash when selecting text or filling out a text box in Firefox. I don't think that this is a problem with Firefox, since the Matrox card, although unstable, could do most of these text sessions. With the S3 Virge card, it was impossible to send e-mail through a WWW page, since it would usually crash while entering text. But, at least no more crashes during logout. The number of crashes went up, however, from 6 per day to 4 per hour, since I would often forget. Also, simply entering text into the Firefox locator bar would often BSOD crash the system. It was possible to access webmail through links (the text browser), but this was onerous. I then tried the second card that I bought, an ATI Mach64. This got me into an infinite loop when the boot process found out that it could not successfully launch the X server. It then offered to automatically reconfigure and/or restart the server. Neither worked, and got back to the initial state. Needless to say, the machine was unusable at this point. I logged into linux rescue mode, and found out that the xorg.conf thad a corrupt display section. I was able to extract the display section from the Matrox configuration file (see, that Matrox card was useful, if only to produce a partially good template) and replace the bad lines in the xorg.conf file for the ati card. This worked!!!! but only for 256 colors, which makes the machine difficult to use with digital photos, which was one reason that I wanted to have it. Is there any easier way to go about installing Fedora Core 3. I still don't have a working system, and I have a stack of 5 video cards, none of which completely work. And all of them are in the www.tldp.org hardware howto documentation page. I'm still wondering if there is a real list of what really works under Fedora Core 3. Maybe these cards can be made to work by tweaking? If so, is there a tweak guide available? My biggest problem is Linux BSOD (cursor freezes or just disappears, alt-ctrl-del is ineffective). __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
