On Friday 08 June 2001 01:56, Mick wrote: > Hello again, > > I am getting very frustrated. Here's the background. New Asus A7A266 m/b > AMD T/Bird 1ghz Proc, 512mb mem. ATI Expert 2000 AGP (Rage 128 Chip) > Have loaded LM 8.0, goes all the way to Xserver, then reverts to prompt, > despite asking it to load gui login during install. > Logged in as root. From prompt I typed XFdrake.(is that right?) I pick all > the hardware I know I have, but it returns with "an error has occurred". > If I try 'startx' from the prompt, a screen load of data scrolls by ending > up at "Fatal Server Error', "No device detected" among a lot of other > stuff. It states it has a log file in /var/log/xfree86.log. Should I be > looking at that file? If so, with what? (We're talking really green newbie > here folks!) I even successfully (after advice from the list staff) updated > the bios, but still I get a 'clock timer config lost error' 'restoring chip > config'. Now in an effort to utilise a process of elimination, I took out > the video card and ran it successfully on a Windows machine. > I even replaced it with an older S3 virge Diamond Stealth PCI card. That > worked fine in the new Linux box! Here are my questions: > Why won't the ATI card work in my Linux box? > How do I start to find the trouble, ie what do I type at the prompt to try > to start X windows manually in LM 8.0? Is XFdrake out of date? > There's also a bigger picture here. My computer buddies think I am crazy to > try to run Linux on a new machine. "Just go ahead and load Windows and stop > with all the bother!" they say. It's a lot to learn, but I see so much > promise in LM, I am trying my best to make them eat their words! I could do > with some major help here. > Any input would be really great. > Thanks in advance. > Mick (on the front lines!) Well, try attaching that file /var/log/xfree86.log to an email to me. The card manufacturers all write drivers for windows and rarely give us enough info to write drivers (protect their IP, they say). By "us" I mean the linux community. Mandrake includes the best free software drivers we can find, mostly from xfree.org, but not all cards are compliant enough with generic drivers for their chipsets to work out of the box. With this particular phenomenon, I am prompted to ask what is sitting NEXT to the video card. The ACP slot shares an interrupt with the PCI slot next to it. I can remember some systems that would lose their video minds because an Intel EEpro ethernet card was next to them.... Moving the ehternet card or using a different video card both solved the "problem". If that is the case, the card in question is out of spec for PCI/AGP, but manufacturers often get away with that becase few software systems really stress the hardware to the limits of specs. It takes a linux compiled for 586-class processors to start showing some of the problems. Some 686 compiled systems have been known to fry data in out-of-spec situations. Civileme QA/Software Testing
