Startup Problem with Fedora 7 and Dell 3007

[jonbl]

I have a Fedora 7 box fitted with a EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTX card and attached Dell 3007WFP monitor. nVidia driver 10.14.19 from the livna F7 repository has been installed, rather than downloading and installing this driver from nVidia's site.

On boot, the screen turns a fuzzy blue at X11 startup, with a pale blue band at the top. This remains until the boot process finishes, when the nVidia logo splash is displayed, and the login dialog is displayed. From there on, everything is fine, with the monitor running at 2560x1600 pixels.

Can anyone assist with resolving this boot problem - eg, should I use nVidia's driver, rather than livna's port for F7?

TIA,
Jon

[xbobmx]

The nvidia driver has nothing to do with your display until the logo is displayed - it is up to the fb console driver in your kernel at that point.

That said, the only fb console that works well with the nvidia driver is the vesafb one, which is somewhat limited and can't set a lot of modes (don't try nvidiafb or rivafb, they don't play well with the nvidia X driver). I believe the 30" panels can only handle two modes or so, so what might be happening is that the vesafb console driver isn't setting a mode your monitor likes. Try passing different vga kernel parameters at boot (see Documentation/fb/vesafb.txt).

[jonbl]

Thanks xbobmx for your quick response!

I'm a newbie to running graphics on Linux systems. What is the vesafb console driver, and where do I find the doco you refer to?

Re 30" panel modes, the Dell 3007 monitor supports two factory-set resolutions - 1280x800, and 2560x1600 pixels.

TIA,
Jon

[xbobmx]

Originally Posted by jonbl

What is the vesafb console driver, and where do I find the doco you refer to?

vesafb is the default builtin fb console driver in the kernel. The documentation for this driver is at the path I mentioned relative to the top-level directory of your kernel source. You might need to get some extra packages for you distribution to get kernel sources installed, or you can try downloading them from kernel.org.