Problems with X on Fedora Core 2...

[InlineFive]

I have tried installing Fedora Core 2 multiple times (default BIOS, low memory timings, etc.) with no luck. All disks are PASSed to install. Once it starts it always says that it can't start the X server and dumps me at a hacker prompt. Any ideas?

 

[soni]

What kind of Videocard do you use?

I have had problem with autodetects on my Matrox card, but never on my nVidia card!

 

[InlineFive]

ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

Does that matter in Linux?

 

[n0cmonkey]

What errors does it give you?

 

[drag]

ATI's support of Linux isn't so hot. That's probably what the problem is.

X windows is a seperate thing from the OS, it's not like Windows were it's GUI is ingrained into everything. It's like a seperate program, a complicated program, but it's seperate non-the-less. So if it' can't start properly it just shuts down with a error.

You just have to figure out the error and fix the problem and it should work. When it dumps you into the command line the OS is still working 100%, for example all your background programs and network services are running.

X windows keeps a log of what it does when it starts up and shuts down. This log is located in /var/log/Xorg.someting.log

Open that up in your favorate text editor and look around. A good newbie-freindly one is Pico and you end up using key combos using the ctrl key to access the different functions. However for now you can just use the less command to scan up and down the log file.


TO FIND THE ERROR MESSAGE:

Like such:

Log in as root....

cd /var/log/
less Xorg.0.log
or
pico Xorg.0.log

(to find it quickly)
cat Xorg.0.log |grep EE

Now I am not 100% on the name of the X config file, but it will be something very similar.

Also the command line has tab autocompletion. So if you type out the first few letters of a command or a file name and that name is unique then you can hit tab and it will finish typing it out for you. Also if the word is not unique hitting tab twice will show you all the possibilities. Good for when you forget how to spell something.

In the log file each new line starts with a couple figures. Normally they don't mean anything, but lines that have EE at the beginning of them are X errors and that is what will break X. And lines that start with WW are warnings. Sometimes they can be safely avioded, other times they may signal a issue that you need to look at.

X windows has a simple text configuration file that it uses to know what sort of setup your using. You can go and manually edit it if your familar with the syntax, but it's difficult if your use to how windows does stuff.

The config file is located in /etc/X11/Xorg.conf I am pretty sure. Traditionally it was /etc/X11/XF86Config but Fedora recently switched from XFree86 to X.org's X windows version, so the naming is slightly different then what most people are familar with.


HOW TO FIX IT.

Also Linux has what is called "runlevels". These are operating modes. The default for Fedora is called "runlevel 5", which in fedora/redhat means "Multiuser with X". You want to switch to runlevel 3, which is "Multiuser without X". (different distros have different runlevel setups, BTW) You do that by going:

telinit 3

Then that will switch you into runlevel 3.

Now try to start X manaully:

startx

That should fail. And hopefully give a error.
Try out Fedora's X configuration tool:

system-config-display

And that should start up a configuration dialog you can use to help set up X windows.
When it asks for the video card setup, tell it ATI. And if that doesn't work when your run startx, then tell it is "VESA". Vesa is a generic compatability mode that most modern cards will work with.

After you get startx to work then exit out of X windows, and run the telinit 5 command to get back into normal operating mode.

That should start up X windows and give you the log in screen.

Later you can go to ATI's website and download and install the propriatory drivers and set them up so that you can have all your 3d acceleration and a nice picture and such.

 

[InlineFive]

OK, per Drag's excellent instructions I am now a step up with the error report. Here it is:

(EE) VESA(0): vm86() syscall generated signal 4.
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
[root@localhost root]#

I found the site with the error above which is here. Unfortunately I can't seem to access the configuration file to modify these settings (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) because my permission is denied. Even as a root. How do I do this? Is it possible the 60Hz on my LCD is screwing this up?

Thank you!

 

[Infohawk]

a hacker prompt.

I've never heard that term before but I like it.

An unhelpful post follows: I find it odd when reviewers say that this or that distro has great hardware detection. Have any of them really gone to like 20 different machines and tried it out? One reason I have a problem with the "easier" automatic distros is that they hide the underworkings and it makes it harder to solve problems. When I was a newbie I started out with debian 'cause it forced me to learn things. It seems like gentoo would educate even more these days. Once I tried mandrake and it had all sorts of hardware detection snags. Sure, I could have fixed 'em but if I wanted to do that I'd stick with Debian. I went back to Debian. Anyway, I'm sure PorBleemo will get passed this problem. Don't be afraid to try #fedora on irc for insantaneous help but I cannot vouch for how helpful they would be. I just had to put in my 2 cents about the so-called more automatic distros and the obstacles they pose to newbies.

 

[Infohawk]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
OK, per Drag's excellent instructions I am now a step up with the error report. Here it is:

(EE) VESA(0): vm86() syscall generated signal 4.
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
[root@localhost root]#

I found the site with the error above which is here. Unfortunately I can't seem to access the configuration file to modify these settings (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) because my permission is denied. Even as a root. How do I do this? Is it possible the 60Hz on my LCD is screwing this up?

Thank you!

If permission is denied perhaps there is a "fedora way" to change the X settings besides diving into the config file. But if you really want to see what the permissions on the file are you should do 'ls -l file' There you will see an order that you can learn about if you read about file permissions. As root you will be able to change the file permissions so that you can change it with chmod u+w file (i think and it depends on who the owner of the file ).

 

[drag]

To become root you log out and log back in with the username "root".

Or you can use the "su" command and it ask for your root password then you can do anything you want.

I don't know why it wouldn't let you do it. Root is "god" you should be able to do anything and everything. (Unless your trying out the SELinux thing, maybe)


edit:

Oh, the config file is named xorg.conf not Xorg.conf, btw. I wasn't sure, but it matters because unix is caps sensitive.

If you decide to edit the configuration manually there are examples on the web and various examples.

You can also read the "man" files on the subject. In linux commands and important files are documented (or a attempt is made at documentation) by simple little man files.

For example the man file for pico can be read as

man pico

Man has it's own man files:

man man

So if you look the man files for xorg.conf (man xorg.org) it will detail the syntax and what the different options mean. When looking thru long Man files sometimes it helps to search thru the text with the "/" key. It's like the find key. Lots of other programs use it too.

The fedora-ism for the gui configuration tool is system-config-display, btw. Normally you would use something like Xorgcfg or xorgcfg or whatnot, but redhat has it's own thing it does.

 

[InlineFive]

OK, I finally figured out how to get into the Xorg.0.log and apparently the reason I am getting the screens error is because it says it can't detect the BIOS on my Radeon 9600 Pro. How do I go about remedying this situation?

And when I do the RunLevel3 and run system-config-display it gives me this error:

[root@localhost root]# system-config-display
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/system-config-display/xconf.py", line 412, in ?
hardware_state.merge_into(xconfig)
NameError: name 'hardware_state' is not defined
[root@localhost root]#

And when I was reinstalling right under something called "kernel mode does not support events : OK" there was something that an error but it wouldn't show the text.

Now what? 🙂

 

[drag]

Well that just sucks.

hmmm..... Can you put a copy of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file up here so we can look at it?

I just tell you then if it's right or wrong or what you need to modify or whatnot.

Here is a sample configuration I got and edited from this dual head setup for the Radian 9700 pro from this discussion

Hopefully this one will work. It uses the unaccelerated radeon drivers.

The mouse in this config is setup to use the optical stuff and a mouse wheel. If your using a different type of mouse you may have to change it.

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "be"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Whatever"
### Uncomment if you don't want to default to DDC:
# DDC is the automatic probe that some monitors support. If it doesn't work try
#specifing the actual rates for your monitor.
# HorizSync 30.0 - 95.0
# VertRefresh 50.0 - 160.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Radeon 9600"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
#change this to what you want
Modes "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection

edit:

also if your messing around a lot with command line, look at using "screen", it's a multiplexer for the terminal so you can have lots of indivaul terminals split the screen into 2 parts and all sorts of fun stuff. Maybe check it out later after you get this done. I don't know. Just use the ctrl-alt-f# stuff for now, I suppose.

Also don't forget you can use text browsers like links or lynx to look at stuff.

And if you have gpm set up so that you can use the use the mouse in the terminal you can copy and paste. You just left click, drag to highlight the text. Then that moves it to the buffer automaticly and then you right click to paste. So you don't have to type this stuff out by hand. It works the pretty much same way in X, but X uses the middle button to paste, not the right. 😉

 

[InlineFive]

Well once again I tried opening the xorg.conf file from root but my permission is still denied. I'm going to redownload the ISOs in hope that one was corrupt but if this doesn't fix it I might be saying hello to Mandrake...

 

[drag]

Dammit. Oh, well. Nothing wrong with Mandrake 😉

Look the permissions issue doesn't make much sense to me. Because if your root, the permissions don't matter so much. You have read write control over everything. Pretty much.


It's too bad, once you get familar the the command line little hiccups like this are usually pretty easy to deal with. But I understand what it is to be a newbie. I was their once myself.


I'll try this. I set up my home box with a anonymous ftp login account and put my previous example of xorg.conf file on it. However I am not sure if I set it up correctly, I haven't got a shell account anywere I could test it from and I am at work now, so I can't punch any more holes in my firewall to let ftp connections go thru if I made a mistake configuring it.

So you should be able to get thru on ftp active mode, put I think passive mode will fail... Don't worry if that doesn't make sense, it will either work or it won't.

The command used to fetch stuff is "wget".

So you would do something like this if you have internet connection from your box:

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/backup.conf
wget ftp://nater.kicks-ass.net/xorg.conf
cp xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf
telinit 3
startx


If you have a problem with permissions again go like this:

whoami

That command will tell what user you are using. If the answer isn't root, then you aren't root.
Then if you still are root then run this command:

chmod 644 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If wget doesn't work you can try to log in thru the command line ftp client. It's command would be "ftp nater.kicks-ass.net" and that should do it. It will fail on passive mode and fall back on active mode, I think. Username would be anonymous and password would be whatever you want.

My ISP sucks and has port 80 screwed up so that I couldn't just set apache up and let you download it from there.

That's about the best I can do for you, except if you decide to let me have root access thru SSH, but I don't know if you would like that so much.

And I don't realy know if my xorg.conf will work anyways. I never owned a ATI card, so the best I can do is a educated guess. :/

Otherwise you have a fully functional Linux distro, just minus X. Which isn't so bad, command line is powerfull and worth knowing. Personally I am a cripple without it. You still have a nice browser if you have links installed. It supports javascript and frames and other happy stuff.

I suppose it could be a corrupt install CDROM, but I doubt it. If your cdrom is setup correctly you can manually test the md5sums of the cdrom by this command:

md5sum /dev/cdrom

If that matches what is on the download servers md5sum text file then you know that it downloaded and burned correctly.

Although the only reference I could find to that system-config-display error was caused by a faulty rpm package in fedora core 2 test 3, but that had been resolved in the final Fedora core2 release.

oh well.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: drag
Although the only reference I could find to that system-config-display error was caused by a faulty rpm package in fedora core 2 test 3, but that had been resolved in the final Fedora core2 release.

oh well.

Well I did download the ISOs from three different mirrors to decrease download times. I did make sure to get the Fedora Core 2 ISOs but I didn't know the difference between what appeared to be the base ISOs and the SRPMS. Could you enlighten me to this fact?

In the meantime I'll try your suggestions above...

 

[drag]

SRPM's is just to distrubute the source code and patches for everything they used to build the OS. You don't need it for normal desktop use, unless you want to hack away at the programs without having to download the source code seperately.

I think it's mainly for developers/whoever that don't have a fast internet connection but want the source code, so they can order the source ISOs from a freind or online company easily.

I used this bittorrent page to download the fedora core2 cdroms for my laptop install

I chose the Official Fedora Core 2 FINAL binary iso images for i386. And that was a 2.1 gig download, but thru bittorrent it's tolerable if you have a resonable fast connection. That gets you disks 1 thru 4 + the rescuecd. I choose the "workstation" install, which is a desktop install with added developement tools and "-dev" files for libraries and apps(source code headers, I think). I only actually needed the first 2 cdroms for that. FC2-i386-disc1.iso and FC2-i386-disc2.iso

When you use bittorrent it checks the validity of the file once it's finished downloading.

If you have one of the "test" versions installed by mistake, don't worry.

check out this:

make sure that your /etc/yum.conf looks something like this:

[fedora-us-2]
name=Fedora Core 2 -- Fedora US mirror
baseurl=http://SERVERNAME/fedora/fedora/2/i386/RPMS.os
[fedora-us-2-updates]
name=Fedora Core 2 updates -- Fedora US mirror
baseurl=http://SERVERNAME/fedora/fedora/2/i386/RPMS.updates
[fedora-us-2-stable]
name=Fedora Linux (stable) for Fedora Core 2 -- Fedora US mirror
baseurl=http://SERVERNAME/fedora/fedora/2/i386/RPMS.stable

Developement versions were something like 1.92 instead of 2.

Basicly you make sure that's pointed at the right server repositories and you go:
yum check-update
and then:
yum update

And that will automaticly download any new packages and updates and install them and configure them. It will also automaticly handle the dependancies for you. By doing that you can upgrade from version to a newer version of the OS. It's a 100% upgrade. And that way you can aviod having to reinstall or getting stuck with a older OS.

Makes it trivially easy to install programs. Although the scope of programs are limited from the "official" sources. To install software like the libdvdcss libraries needed to decode DVD's for playing them you have to use 3rd party rpm's.

Luckly you can use Yum (and Apt) with third party people.

People like dag and FreshRPM maintain yum/apt repositories you can pull extra programs from. Becarefull with mixing and matching stuff though. I personally restrict my mixing with Fedora's official stuff and Freshrpm's stuff.

It's to bad that a pain-in-the-butt ATI card incompatability/config bug has to be such a big issue. 🙁

 

[InlineFive]

OK, here are some updates.

1. I can't get into your FTP server because it won't let me log in without a password.
2. Since I was bored I installed the ATI drivers (properly I hope) and now I get an error that says:

(EE) VESA(0): vm86() syscall generated signal 4

3. How do I run a program in Linux?

-Por

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
OK, here are some updates.

1. I can't get into your FTP server because it won't let me log in without a password.
2. Since I was bored I installed the ATI drivers (properly I hope) and now I get an error that says:

(EE) VESA(0): vm86() syscall generated signal 4

3. How do I run a program in Linux?

-Por

You can run the program by typing the name if it is in your path. If it is not in your path you will need to type the path to it.