From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040116 Description of problem: After installing FC2 on a Dell GX270 machine then X11 fails to start after first boot. Reducing the color depth from 24 to 16 allows X11 to start with VGA resolution. It is not possible to change this resolution to anything else. After some searching it seems this is a known issue with some chipsets, see: http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/855patch.html After installing the 865patch utility X11 works as expected. It is stated that the problem is fixed with Dell BIOS A04, but this is the BIOS version on my machine, as reported with dmidecode, so perhaps the problem still persists. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.7.0-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install FC2 on Dell GX270 machine. 2. Reboot after install - X11 dies. 3. Reduce color depth, get VGA resolution Actual Results: X11 would start in VGA mode when the color depth was reduced. It is not possible to change the resolution to something better. Expected Results: X11 should have started properly and allowed something better than VGA resolution. Additional info: It seems this is an issue with several common pc makes that uses Intel embedded graphics.
My Dell Dimension 8600 had this problem as well. It seems to be fixed with BIOS A10 for the Dimension 8600 released June 29, 2004. Although since the update I have a different Xorg bug (bug 127222) that may or may not be related.
This problem is caused due to buggy Dell BIOS in your system. The 855patch.html URL contains a very ugly hack to work around the problem, which is not really acceptable quality to include in the distribution. The proper fix is to flash the BIOS to a fixed one if one is available, as mentioned in comment #1 above, however from what I understand, the new Dell BIOS is buggy also. Either way, only Dell can fix their BIOS. If a proper workaround becomes available in X.Org CVS, it will appear in a future release of Fedora Core, however only a proper fix will be considered for Fedora Core updates. I'm closing this as WONTFIX for now, as there's no known fix for this available to my knowledge. I recommend testing the current rawhide X.Org test release and updating the report to indicate if the problem has been worked around or not. If the problem still exists in current X.Org CVS, you can file a bug report in X.Org bugzilla to track the issue if you like. We do not have Intel chipset documentation however, so we are reliant on those who do have such documentation to supply a proper cleanly implemented driver workaround which programs the chipset directly from within the video driver, in order to consider it for our OS. Closing as "WONTFIX".