been a while
It’s been a while since I last posted. A lot has changed. I’m beginning to transition from the operations team over to the development team at work, I finished building my California-compliant AR-15, and I found a deal on a 1911 (7 days until I get to pick it up!). I’ve also dual-booted my desktop machine to run Fedora 9 and XP.
I initially had some difficulties with the graphical install for Fedora 9. I should have known it was a bad sign that I had to go back and install via the text-only install. After the initial installation, I had issues with grub not finding my XP install. Since Fedora was installed on an IDE drive and XP on my first SATA drive, it was a simple drive-ordering issue that was easily corrected in the grub.conf file using the map directive.
Now that I could boot both XP and Fedora, I turned my attention back to Fedora. At this time, I cannot get into run-level 5. As soon as I switch run levels either via the grub boot menu or via the init 5 command, I loose all video signals and my monitor shuts off. This was the same issue that forced me to run the text-based install instead of the graphical install. I think it is somehow related to my choice of video hardware: ATI 9600 Pro 128MB All-In-Wonder 8x AGP.
One option would be to download and install ATI’s proprietary drivers, but the installation is GUI based, so I’m SOL since I can’t get into run-level 5 at all!
Tonight I ran a yum update and picked up some new stuff that I thought might have fixed this issue, but I have not had any luck yet. To add insult to injury, I noticed in the grub boot menu that I know have two different linux options….guess I need to figure out WTF is going on. I’m contemplating picking up a cheap nVidia based AGP graphics card and swapping out my ATI card just to get up and running.
All I really want is a desktop linux machine as I already have a linux server (serving these very bits that you’re viewing). I’ve decided that I am going to persue weaning myself off of XP. As far as I can tell, the only thing keeping me on windows is the fact that the games we make at work run on that platform and I need to be able to test the games from my machine. That requirement is going to change soon though as I finally convinced my boss that a laptop would be a good idea for me.