On Tue, 8 Apr 2014 19:05:52 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk allegedly wrote:
I ran the Live DVD and that works fine! It displays at full screen resolution with all the normal taskbar icons.
Good oh.
I ran one or two checks on the Live DVD. For example, I looked at what kernel stuff was installed and also graphics. It had lots of NVidia stuff in there so for me, it's not something I can easily transfer over. I also ran the same graphics test I do here and although it got further than this (faulty) one does, it didn't get to a full screen display (the bit where it says 'do you want to accept this'.
I'm not at all sure what you are doing here. /What/ exactly had lots of nvidia stuff in it? Your xorg.conf file? (unlikely since you are using an ATI/AMD card). What graphics test were you running?
So what can I learn from that? How do I fix the mis-configuration on the machine using the Live DVD or do I bite the bullet and re-install Mageia 4 (I have to admit, that does sound the normal way to fix Windows problems!)?
Re-installing is a bit drastic. We shouldn't need to do that.
Xorg is normally smart enough to auto configure without an xorg.conf file. But it looks as if you might need to give it some help by supplying one of your own.
Mageia is RPM based I believe. On a debian/*buntu type distro I would suggest running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" in order to dump a new xorg.conf file based on: the skeletal default; your supplied answers to questions; and some probed results. I have no idea what the RPM equivalent of that would be. Maybe someone else on the list can help here.
If X is not running you could dump an xorg.conf file by running (as root) "Xorg -configure". You can then use that as the initial config file. You would need to check in the "Device" section that you have the Driver set to "ati" or "radeon" of course (and not fglrx which you know is not working)
You should take a look at the Xorg.0.log file (in /var/log) on both the working system (from the live distro) and the non-working system. Those files tell you which configuration is used as the starting point (if an xorg.conf file exists anywhere), and which modules are loaded and initialised. A study of those files, particularly the one from the working live distro, should tell you what would work in the xorg.conf file you are trying to build.
Beyond that I'm not at all sure what to suggest (except perhaps using Mint......)
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