[conspire] new laptop Fedora 13 with NVIDIA graphics card, - yum update - now only blank screen

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ed Biow (biow at sbcglobal.net):

> Actually, Fedora now defaults to the open source nouveau driver
> instead of nv these days.

I knew that, but didn't mention it because

1.  nouveau still strikes me as way too alpha.
2.  Nothing Darlene has said suggests she cares about 3D.

> I actually considered switching the OS to Fedora, just because it is
> so cutting edge, but Fedora dropped the PPC architecture in 13.  Maybe
> I could bring the laptop to a CABAL and seeing if the assembled gurus
> could help me make the machine happy with nouveau.

As long as it's not a Power Mac G4 MDD with dual 867 Mhz CPU, you can
use Fedora's nouveau driver for any built-in Nvidia video chips.  For
that one chip, you would need to yum-install package xorg-x11-drv-nv and
do 

  echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

Anyhow, sorry, but installation options for PowerPC are dropping fast.
There are are, e.g., no Fedora prebuilt ISOs anywhere for later than
Fedora 12 -- albeit, I suppose you could install Fedora 12 and then see
if it's still possible to yum-update your way to modernity (if the repos
even still bother to carry packages; dunno):  
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq#Fedora_12_-.3E_Fedora_13

Sounds like a bit of an exercise in masochism, to me, and I'd give up at
that point and switch to Debian unstable/testing, but it's your nickel
and therefore your call.