On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 18:19 -0700, Rick Graves wrote:

Hey,

I have two bits of info that suggest this is more of a RedHat problem than a Linux problem:

There are actually a couple different issues ... and they can't be really be lumped together.

1. A high school friend had exactly this problem

(screen when blank when booting up) on a computer running RedHat 9. (A different monitor had been used to install RedHat 9, and that monitor worked OK. Later, my high school friend got a different monitor, which went blank on boot up.) I solved the problem for my friend by swapping his nVIDIA card for a Voodoo Banshee. (And then I upgraded him to CentOS-3.)

This issue (the blank, black screen) happen when newer NVIDIA cards (usually newer than FX 5200) are used that XFree86 thinks can use the older "nv" driver ... but changes in the hardware prevent the driver from working correctly. This makes XFree86 think that X started correctly, but it did not. (Installing the REAL "nvidia" drivers and not the reverse engineered "nv" solves this problem)

This issue can also happen if the correct numbers for HorizSync and VertRefresh are used, thereby allowing X to think it can load a mode that it can not. You should always check the values that were put in for HorizSync and VertRefresh against the actual monitor specs.

2. I tried doing a Debian X desktop install on my test

bench system with the nVIDIA TNT2 card plugged in. Debian's X install is more manual (less automatic) than under CentOS. I had to tell it which driver to use ("nv"), which I found by looking it up via Google. Debian could not get X to load -- after the screen flashed several times, Debian gave up and dumped me onto a text prompt with some messages on the screen.

This issue is normally easier to fix, the X-Server didn't start. This one has many reasons, most of which can be fixed based on the output of /var/log/XFree86.0.log.

Maybe it is fair to say that it is a Linux problem, which RedHat 9 and its descendants do not handle well.

They are actually Xwindows (XFree86 and X.org) problems caused by NVIDIA's and ATI's (there are similar issues with ATI drivers) refusal to open source the drivers for their products. Since the real divers are not open source, the X-Windows drivers are developed by reverse engineering and trial and error ... and don't have things like 3D support.

So, really, ATI and NVIDIA are to blame ... but if you want/need recent 3D performance, a Voodoo Banshee card from 1998 is not going to get the job done. Therefore, making either an ATI or NVIDIA 3D card work is a must for real video performance.

It is usually not that hard, just boot into console mode, and install the binary drivers provided by ATI or NVIDIA. (that can be complicated at times, especially if you throw in a chipset like the NVIDIA NFORCE2, where the agpgart drivers are also not included in some older kernels).

Due to NVIDIA and ATI not releasing the drivers so they can be placed in the kernel source and compiled as modules when you upgrade your kernel (like most hardware is), when you upgrade your kernel, you have to recompile the NVIDIA and ATI drivers ... that is also a linux issue, not a RedHat / CentOS issue. This same issue happens with any hardware (Wireless NIC, Camera, SCSI card, etc.) where proprietary drivers are required and not included in the kernel.

RHEL exacerbated this problem by taking some items that are included in the kernel.org kernel and calling it "unsupported", meaning that RHEL isn't supported on this hardware. That is what the kernel-unsupported package is all about.

----------------------- Johnny Hughes http://www.HughesJR.com/