Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 134104
No recovery procedure for bad graphics driver...
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:50 EST
Description of problem: I have a Gigabyte Radeon 9550 AGP graphics card. It is not supported by Fedora. Feora used the Generaic VESA driver for it. It was working fine, untill I tried to change the driver to the Unsupported VGA driver. Now the X11 server won't start, and when it fails to start it does not bring up the utility for resetting your graphics card settings. In RedHat 9, when I selected a bad driver, and the X11 server failed to start, a utility would be brought up that allowed me to select another driver. This utility doesn't appear in Fedora. The point of the bug report is not to say "my graphics card doesn't work in Fedora". The point of this bug report is to question why the non-graphical driver seleting tool, that would run when the X11 server failed to start, has been removed. Additional info: Processor: AMD Duron 1.3GHz Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X (the original, no MX or SE) Graphics card: Gigabyte Radeon 9550 128Mb AGP (based on ATI Radeon 955 chipset) RAM: 384Mb 133MHz DDR CD Drive: Memorex 48X-24X-48X CD-RW (Memorex 48MAXX) HardDrive (Linux drive): Maxtor 20Gb ATA-IDE Sound Card: SoundBlaster PCI 512 Networking card: Broadcomm Gigabit LAN (integrated into ASUS A7V8X)
Please try system-config-display --reconfig and report back
Note for FC2 you'll need the erratum (ensure you have updated from the updates repository for system-config-display).
I was able to get help on editing the files that determine what graphics driver to use thanks to the people on the IRC channel. But Fedora should have never been released without some means of recovering from a bad graphics driver. Even Windows has a mode where you can boot using only the generic drivers so that you can fix driver issues. Also, I have no static internet connection for Fedora to use. I downloaded the CD ISOs while at college, so unless the updates come in ISO format to be burned on CD, or in an RPM file that I can download and install at a later time, then I can't really use them.
The fact that --reconfig was broken was a bug, it was fixed in rawhide soon after without erratum. I can only apologise for the tardiness but I corrected the lack of erratum recently. Updates are simply rpms - which you can burn off else where and transfer, then update using rpm CLI or probably better yum/up2date and a file/dir repository. You can always boot into single user mode (no graphics) to repair things - and s-c-display --reconfig does what you desire. Closing, as feature exists in FC2 updates and you have recovered by other means anyway.