[nflug] Fedora 7 Review

[Kevin E. Glosser]

Stephen Burke wrote:
> Every time, X fails to start when it can't find a monitor attached to the motherboard 
> video card, which seems trully strange when the signal has to go through 
> the nvidia card for me to even see X failing.

I'm not familiar with this particular issue. However, I'll mention a few 
things...

1) Fedora does not ship with NVIDIA's driver, because it is not 
considered "free" software. It's proprietary.

Fedora does ship with a driver that allows for 2d operations to work. 
The first thing I would do is download and install the Linux driver from 
NVIDIA's website. There are two versions of it, the "new" one and the 
"legacy". Judging by how you named your video card, it sounds like 
you'll need the "legacy" driver. I use the "legacy" driver, with my 
GeForce 4 Titanium card.

You can probably avoid manually installing the driver, if you have yum 
set up to point to an external repository that has it. Most external 
repo's have it as a rpm, but usually lag behind the release date 
slightly. Or, you can install it manually which is not difficult...

[requires kernel source to be installed]

A) boot or enter run mode 3
B) as root run the script..."sudo sh ./[name of file]"
C) choices are self explanatory (I believe at the end now, it asks if 
you want your X configuration file updated, you can select "yes" if 
you've not done it previously. Only do this once. It should fix your X 
config file to have the necessary changes for the new driver to work.)
D) re-enter run mode 5

If it's working you should see a NVIDIA splash screen appear, where 
previously you did not.

2) If the issue still persists, you do have an excellent resource 
available, that being the NVIDIA Linux forums. If you go to their site, 
navigate to where you can download the Linux driver, you'll see a link 
for their "Linux forums". There, you'll find many posts with solutions 
to many issues. If you do not find your specific problem, you can create 
a new post and someone will respond, usually promptly. I'd make sure to 
check all the previous posts however, before creating a new one. I'm 
positive they'll have a solution for you.

3) Yes, this is an annoyance with distro's that try to release only 
"Free" software. In my review, I mentioned the Fedora project is working 
on a solution. Fedora 7 shipped with a beta NVIDIA driver, that is 
"open/free". It's called "nouveau". It's not active by default. I 
wouldn't recommend using it though, as it's still early in it's 
development. However, in the future, it might be the solution to this issue.

KEG