[conspire] (forw) Re: June 25/July 9 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56 continuation

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com> -----

Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:12:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com>
To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: June 25/July 9 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56
	continuation
X-Mailer: YahooMailClassic/14.0.3 YahooMailWebService/0.8.112.307740

Hi Rick:

Bought a Matrox G4 card today. However, do not seem to find in
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/latest/

does it have to exactly match ?

Receive message "No screen found" upon issue startx after Centos comes
up.  Tried ftp /var/log/Xorg.0.log to another windows XP PC but receive
permission denied, even after chmod 777 Xorg.0.log.  Any suggestions ?

Thx,. Eddie

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:48:55 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: June 25/July 9 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56
	continuation
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting wood eddie (ewood111 at yahoo.com):

> Bought a Matrox G4 card today. However, do not seem to find in
> http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/latest/
> 
> does it have to exactly match ?

Two things I notice immediately:

1.  There's no such Matrox card model number as G4, though there is a
Matrox graphics _chip_ called the G4+, which as used for the G400 card.  
If you mean that the big chip on the card is a Matrox G4+, OK, good, and
that would be important information, because one must use an X server
compatible with the video chip.  (However, as we'll see below, the Xorg
people have a user-friendly attitude and list particular video cards
known to be compatible with each driver.)  I would suggest you look
carefully at the card to make sure you know what it is.

2.  You're looking for X11 drivers (presumably something you can drop
into the Xorg driver framework on your CentOS installation) at the
video card manufacturer's Web site.  That should be your absolute _last_
resort, not your first.  Manufacturer drivers for Linux tend to be
buggy, proprietary, and poorly maintained (hence, prone to becoming
broken over time as the development of Linux distributions moves on).
You really would logically look first at Xorg's pages, where information
about the mainline open source drivers is.

I mentioned before one such page:
http://www.x.org/wiki/Projects/Drivers

That page mentions that Xorg's 'mga' driver supports the following
Matrox cards:  Matrox Millennium I/II,Mystique,
G100,G200,G400,G450,G550,G550 Dual-DVI

Now, at the time you installed CentOS, the CentOS 'anaconda' installer
installed only those portions of Xorg that it believed were relevant to
your system.  At that time, you didn't have a Matrox card in your
computer.  Therefore, anaconda didn't install the rpm package containing
the 'mga' driver.  If you look on
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.6/os/i386/CentOS/ , you will see all
released i386 rpms in CentOS 5.6.  One of them is:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.6/os/i386/CentOS/xorg-x11-drv-mga-1.4.13-1.el5.i386.rpm	

You can fetch that file (or get it from your CentOS DVD) and install it
using this old-fashioned invocation of /usr/bin/rpm:

#  rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-drv-mga-1.4.13-1.el5.i386.rpm

...or you can use the much more modern, better method of asking yum to
fetch the package for you and automatically install it using rpm:

#  yum install xorg-x11-drv-mga

Either way, that's your problem, and that's your way forward.

After installing the necessary Xorg server, you'll also want to move
your existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf out of the way, and then make Xorg
generate a brand-new conffile.

$ su -
# cd /etc/X11
# mv xorg.conf xorg.conf-old
# Xorg -configure

You will now see a newly generated xorg.conf in that directory, and
startx should now work.


Anyway, please remember, in the vast majority of cases,
manufacturer-written drivers for Linux that are maintained separately
and downloadable from hardware-firm Web/ftp sites are undesirable unless
there is no better alternative, and that should be the _last_ place you
look.

> Tried ftp /var/log/Xorg.0.log to another windows XP PC but receive
> permission denied, even after chmod 777 Xorg.0.log.  Any suggestions ?

I'm sorry, but I could not possibly debug _that_ problem without a lot
more specifics. 

----- End forwarded message -----