Description of problem: I have an eMachines 333cs with a Trigem Delhi III motherboard with a 4 MB ATI Rage IIc video card. This card is known to have trouble with more than 16-bit color when set at a decent resolution. During initial installation, the video is fine. But during and after firstboot, the video is corrupted, indicating that the video is now in a barely usable 24-bit mode with massive video corruption. At this point, I half-blindly stumble through firstboot and into initial login, where I go to system-config-display to set the color depth from "millions of colors" down to "thousands of colors" where the display looks normal again after restarting X. Anaconda recognizes both my monitor and video card. It would be nice if firstboot could set the color depth to 16 bits automatically (an alternative would be to make the resolution sufficiently low, but I think that for most people a good resolution is more important than the tiny difference between 16- and 24-bit color). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firstboot-1.97-1.fc9.i386 How reproducible: always Additional info: This problem has existed for years, I just haven't gotten around to reporting it until now. My father has a machine with the same motherboard and problem and it's difficult for me to walk him through installation over the phone when he can't even read the display.
This is fixed in rawhide, where we are no longer setting up our own special X environment but instead are using X to set itself up. If you continue to see problems there, we'll need to file a bug against X because it's detecting things wrong.
I will probably wait until F10 before attempting another install. If the problem persists, should the component I report it under be xorg-x11? And is the video mode in initial install now set using the same method as used during firstboot and after (so the video would either be corrupted all the way through, or never)?
You can install the rawhide firstboot without dragging in the rest of rawhide to test that out. The new plan for anaconda and firstboot is that we are entirely using X, and don't require any config file. So whatever X detects and sets up in anaconda will be the same as firstboot which will be the same as the running system. So yes it should either work everywhere or nowhere, but xorg-x11 would be the component to file against if it doesn't work anywhere.
I just attempted install using an early copy of the Fedora 10 i386 DVD (sha1sum 086fd570518ac58d3966c43c1b6d146e38919d8d). Unfortunately, the video is screwed up from the beginning now, so I can't install at all. Filed bug #472687 against xorg-x11 in rawhide.