ATI 9200 screen blanks.

[electralake]

Not sure if I should have posted this in Installation, Hardware or Here, I apologize if it is in the wrong spot.

I'm running a dual boot with XP pro, used to have Mandrake but decided to give Fedora a try.

Machine Spec:
Acer Ferrari 3000
AMD XP-M 2500
512MB Ram
60GB HD
ATI Mobility 9200 Radeon 128MB
Pioneer DVD-+RW/CD RW
1400 X 1050 LCD

Problem is when it tries to run the first boot the screen goes blank and nothing works except holding down the power button to get the machine to reboot. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Justin

[ghenry]

After you have installed it?

[electralake]

Yup, it's installed. I selected the generic LCD 1400 X 1050.

[electralake]

Should have preceded the topic with Uber newbie, but Mandrake worked great. (except for the batter meter).

[ghenry]

If you press ctrl-alt-F1 a cuople of times you should get a console up.

[electralake]

Tried the ctrl-alt-F1 with no luck, also hooking up an external monitor and using the function keys did not produce a screen. Should I do the ctrl-alt-F1 after selecting fedora in the grub?

[ghenry]

My thinking is that the X server is tripping up with your resolution.

Try passing this:

single

to your grub kernel line, i.e. press e for edit when you get to the grub prompt.

Then see if it boots.

[electralake]

Excellent, I like progress. I passed single (I have no idea what it does) and I loaded into the command line, logged in as root, then tried to startx and “pop” back to the blank screen. Giving validation to your correct diagnose that the x server is probably the cause of all the problems.

[Darkmage]

What version of FC are you running or more important, do you have XFree or Xorg?

[ghenry]

Have a look at:

/var/log/XFree86.0.log

i.e. at your console type nano -w /var/log/XFree86.0.log and look for errors.

[electralake]

I'm running the FC 2 test 3. Inside of the /var/log I have Xorg.0.log file In this file there is a

(II) VESA(0): VBESetVBEMode failed...Tried agin without customized values.

also there is some text about "Attempting to use 75Hz refresh for mode '1400X1050' (142)" This that line repeats for all screen sizes down to "640X480"

in windows my screen refresh rate is 60Hz

I've never used nano, only VI and I must say that I like it.

[electralake]

I started over with a clean install and on the first boot when it drops in the detail the last thing I see before the screen goes blank is starting "System Config Display".

I just want to say thanks for helping.

[jrblevin]

I had the same problem yesterday with Fedora Core 2 Test 3 with and an ATI Radeon Mobility 9200. I couldn't ctl-alt-f1 or even reboot with ctl-alt-del. After digging around a while I found a post somewhere about the xorg config file. I think the problem was with system-config-display looking for /etc/X11/XF86Config which is no longer used. (Sorry I don't remember the details about the bug....) This sounds like your problem since that's the last thing you saw.

Fedora core 2 has replaced XFree86 with Xorg and the config filenames have changed. It now uses /etc/X11/xorg.conf. To fix everything, I made a symbolic link to the xorg config file to fool the display config tool. Boot into single user mode as before by adding 'single' to the grub line and as root type:

# cd /etc/X11
# ln -s xorg.conf XF86Config

Next, I'm not totally sure, but I either rebooted and everything worked or I started in console-only mode by typing 'init 3' and then ran 'startx'. Either way, I got X up and going but when I tried to reboot or log out, the screen would go black again. To fix that, I just installed all of the current updates and now everything is working great. I'm not sure which package was causing the problem...and I didn't worry too much about it after the ordeal.

I suppose this will only work if the xorg.conf file is right in the first place. The generic LCD setting should be okay, which video card did you select? I'm using the vesa generic one, I don't know if xorg has support for the 9200 mobility yet. Haven't played around with it yet. Also, you might try doing the updates from the console first (by running 'yum update') instead of fooling with the symbolic link. The updates might fix everything themselves. Hope this helps.

[electralake]

I couldn't use the yum update because the network doesn't get started with single passed into the grub. I did do the
ln -s xorg.conf XF86Config
which brought up the time, user config, etc. then back to the blank screen. I then shutdown and restarted it with the init 3 and logged in as my user and ran startx and wala a running system. Thanks Guys for all the help. Running the Up2Date right now.

[Darkmage]

Even though your problem is solved, you should not be using XF86Config because it has depreciated. When Xorg starts it looks for xorg.conf, if it is not available then it looks for XF86Config.
Just for future references, XF86Config might be removed in future updates. My recommendation is to

cp xorg.conf xorg.bak
cp XF86Config xorg.conf
instead of the link

[electralake]

The sym-link has been removed and I copied the xorg.conf into the XF86Config
Thanks for the pointer.

[Darkmage]

Do you mean you copied XF86Config into xorg.conf :D

[jrblevin]

XF86Config didn't exist originally, only xorg.conf. The problem was with system-config-display incorrectly looking for XF86Config rather than xorg.conf. It would try to run at each boot because it thought the display wasn't configured. Something it was doing caused the screen to black and the system to stop responding, although I have no idea what would do that. I thought maybe it was trying an incorrect modeline and my laptop display just freaked out instead of trying it. At any rate, tricking it with an XF86Config file caused it to stop running on boot.

[Darkmage]

In FC2T3 both XF86Config and xorg.conf should exist even though it is a bug and the problem was solved with the upgrade to system-config-display-1.0.14-1. More explaination is available at bugzilla (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=121729)
Basically Fedora's direction is to remove all traces of XFree.

[jrblevin]

That's interesting. I guess I didn't make it to firstboot X setup because of the bug. There definitely wasn't an XF86Config. The first time I successfully booted was via single user mode and init 3.