PROBLEM I've got a new box, it's got a intel DQ965GF mobo, with 2 SATA disks (LVM) and came with Fedora 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 running on it. I wanted to put my old nVidia geForce fx 5200 (PCI card) into it to allow me to use both my TFTs. However, when I do this it gets to the GRUB menu, starts to load a kernel (is that the right phrase) and then falls over. If I leave the card in but tell the BIOS to use the internal graphics it boots okay. But when return BIOS to auto detect or explicitly use the nVidia card it falls over during boot. I've tried appending acpi=off pci=nommconf at the end of the GRUB boot command but with no success. Generally the failure messages say (at about the time there's agpgart messages): general protection fault 0000[1] SMP WORKING SOLUTION After much messing about, I've discovered that appending agp=off allows me to boot into runlevel 3 with the nVidia card installed. It therefore appears there's some problem within (Fedora's?) agpgart (?) when nVidia card is chosen. I then download the nVidia geForce FX 5200 driver from nVidia web site for 64bit machine: & as root, run the downloaded script NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-100.14.11-pkg2.run it had to build a module. & I let it create a xorg.conf Then run 'startx' and it boots into X & menu item: applications->system tools->nVidia X server settings gives user access to various options One also has to amend the GRUB menu.lst so as to do 'agp=off' on future reboots. Quite straightforward once the culprit (agp) has been identified! I hope this is useful to others having problems (hence the rename of subject & x-posting), although I suspect it may be a Fedora kernel issue rather than anything more general Michael Bane Univ of Manchester, UK |
