From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 Description of problem: The graphical install process for both 7.3 and 8.0 will happily drive my ancient Virge S3 video card. Once installed, neither release appears to contain XFree86 3.0 and the 4.0 XFree86 does not support the IBM Ramdac chip in this graphics card. Either the install process should refuse to enter graphics mode or the full OS should support the graphics card. I'm not questioning the decision to not support old graphics cards - just pointing out that it's inconsistent to allow graphical install and then have the OS not boot into graphics mode. This could easily cause someone who was unfamiliar with Linux to decide that Linux just didn't work. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.find ancient S3 Virge PCI card 2.load RH 7.3 or 8.0 3. Actual Results: RH 7.3 died on system boot with a cryptic warning about an unsupported IBM Ramdac chip in the XFree86 logs. RH 8.0 could never find a set of parameters that actually worked to drive the monitor during the monitor testing phase of install (even though I was running the install in graphics mode). Expected Results: RH 8.0 install should have warned of an unsupported graphics card somewhere during the install process. Additional info:
Do you happen to know if the installer fell back to the VESA driver to get the graphical installation running, or did it use the native driver? XFree86 3.x is not present in Red Hat Linux 8.0, so the installer never tries to use it.
I'm not familiar enough with the difference between VESA mode and the native driver to answer that. If VESA mode is a clunky looking text window like soundcfg (sndconfig?) used to use then that's not what I saw. The install screen was made of "real" graphics. I have replaced the card but have not yet thrown it away. If the mode visible before the disk gets partitioned, I can swap cards and run the install up to the point where I could answer this question (assuming you can describe what you need to know). I do recall that the install "clunked" the monitor once just before it went into graphics mode. By "clunked" I mean that the screen went blank and the monitor made a sound similar to a relay switching before the graphical mode began.
The Virge I have works - I'm not sure what we can do differently with cards that support is slowly disappearing for. This would be a redhat-config-xfree86 issue however.
I am confused as to why the X server would work for the installer but then not work after installation. If Virge that we have works, I'm not sure exactly what we can do about this bug. It's possible that the more recent X versions support some Virges but not others, and I'm not sure if there's a way for us to know which ones will work and which won't. :(
Resolving as 'wontfix'. I don't know what else I can do.