Tuesday, December 23

Geek

I Got Another Grub

Okay, Nagi is up and running (though Tsugumi and Zange-chan are out of commission until I can sort out VirtualBox's notworking), and it's time to wipe Haruhi and install Linux.

So off with the Vista and on with the CentOS 5.2, which installs smoothly, and then I get a grub.

That's it.  One word.  Grub.

I think that's how Yurie ended up with Fedora 8.

So, I says, no worries, I says, I'll load up Fedora 10 instead.  There's really not that much difference, it's a popular distribution, more up to date, and probably has better hardware support.

Except not.

They've enabled a little feature called "kernel modesetting", which is an attempt to de-crappify X's resolution switching.  The only problem is that it doesn't work on many common graphics chips - such as the one in Haruhi and Yurie (AMD 690G / ATI X1200).

That's okay though, since you can disable it at boot time on the installer.  Except not: That brings it up in a resolution my screen can't display.

That's okay though, since you can specify the resolution you want the installer to run at.  Except not.  That still brings it up in a resolution my screen can't display.

Specifying a nice safe 800x600 brings it up in 400x300, which is amusing but of little practical use, and then goes completely blank.  Specifying 1600x1200 tells you that's an unsupported mode, and provides a list of supported modes - including 1600x1200.  If I select that...  It brings it up in a resolution my screen can't display.

I could do a text mode install.  But I want to do some custom partitioning and LVM stuff, and that's a royal pain even in graphical mode.

So Linux in 2008 is zero for two here at Pixy Labs.

Update: Tried CentOS with a dead simple disk configuration.  Grub.  Now trying a Fedora 10 install in text mode with a more complex configuration (RAID-1 /boot, RAID-5 /).  If that works, I can put the GeForce 9600GT back in, do the install, update it to drivers that reportedly actually work, take the card out, copy everything across from Yurie, install the card in Yurie, install Fedora 10 there, update that as well, take the card out again, and then get on with what I was trying to do AT THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER.  (Which was: Get polls working in Minx.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I would bet that the reason your display didn't handle that mode wasn't because of the resolution, it was because of the refresh rate. (Which observation probably isn't helpful, but anyway...)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, December 23 2008 01:30 PM (+rSRq)

2 Quite possibly, but the monitor doesn't tell me anything helpful.

Anyway, just finished updating, so let's reboot and see what we see...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 23 2008 02:08 PM (PiXy!)

3 What we see is a whole bunch of suck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 23 2008 02:15 PM (PiXy!)

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