Re: FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

[Old thread: Hmm... I am trying to install FC4 but anaconda graphics broke!]

Hello all,

My System is:

- VA Linux Systems 501 (yes it is an old system)
- Video: Cirrus Logic  GD5840
- Monitor: Hitachi CM715

I tried to install FC4 "out of the box" and the GUI installation
fails.  I tried ALL SORTS OF THINGS and I could NOT
get FC4 to come up with the X11 windows system.

The video card is correcty found but not the monitor.

Here are things I tried:
=========================================
1) Did the GUI-based installation but was not able to continue
    because the screen was jumbled badly.

2) Did Text-based installation and installed everything and hoped
    that I can somehow fix the X11/GUI later:

  a) Manually added Monitor/Video details to /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
      tried to start X and does not work.

  b) Tried a/usr/bin/X -configure, and xorg.conf.XXX file was
      generated in /tmp and trying /etc/X11/X -conf /tmp/xorf.conf.XXX
      does work.  In fact it is much worse as the mouse could not be
      found even when manually added, along with specs for the video
      and monitor results in a blank screen and it appeared to hang.

3) In the many reboots, I tried to stop the boot process with "I" to
stop the probes but was unable to.  This is a seperate issue right
now but if anyone wants to test it, let me know how to get this to
work.

4) Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Ctrl-Alt-F1 did not work for me so
a forced reboot was necessary.

In general,  the X11 system does try to come up but the screen is
jumbled or interlaced-looking but otherwise very unreadable so I could
not do anything and the really wierd thing is that if you let the X11
run for 3-5 minutes it appears to look like a curses screen but
unfortunely with very weird characters and unreadable. There
is a blue border at the edges of the screen if that tells you
anything.

So - after banging on this all day, I gave up, and went back to
FC3 and god... the darn thing actually works "out of the box"
as with FC2 and FC1.  I see the GUI just fine (800x600) and I
was able to install as usual.  Seems that FC4 is really HOSED
for older systems?  This is not cool :-(

I am not sure if it is worth try to upgrade from FC3 to FC4 only to find
out that the X11 system would get hosed again.

Any thoughts?

Kind regards,
Dan

This is a known bug that affects Cirrus and some other video chipsets.

Check on bugzilla for the gory details.

-Mike