[TriLUG] X video modes for CentOS 5 on a PowerEdge 300

[Christopher L Merrill]

Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thursday 21 August 2008 16:48, Christopher L Merrill wrote:
>> I've got an old PE 300 (pentium 3) that I'm trying to get CentOS 5
>> running on. We had no trouble running CentOS 3 on these machines in
>> the past.  After install, when X starts, I get the bottom of the desktop
>> cutoff in the X session. Instead, in that area it shows the top inch
>> or so of the desktop.
>>
>> I've been fortunate in the past and never had to hand-configure
>> X video modes. As a result, my Google-foo is weak and I haven't
>> even found a good starting point.
>>
>> Can anyone point me to a good troubleshooting guide?
> 
> Knoppix is your friend. Boot knoppix, mount a hard drive partition r/w, and 
> copy Knoppix's Xorg.conf to the hard disk. My experience is it usually 
> creates a 60hz blinky image that is irritating as an all day thing, but I 
> doubt you'll be using a 300Mhz machine all day anyway.

Brilliant!  I pulled out my trusty Knoppix 5.1.1 CD and copied over
the resulting xorg.conf file - it is working like a champ now!
Next time you are in the RTP area, give me call - I'll buy you lunch :>

As an aside, 300 is the model, it is actually a 2x800MHz PIII, so despite
being 7 years old, it makes a very usable desktop.  My wife was using
an identical machine for web/email on Fedora 4 until recently.  I'll be
using this one as a server, but having a GUI during setup and testing
is very handy.

Chris


For the archives: the Dell Poweredge 300 has ATI 3D Rage IIC AGP graphics
and works great at 1024x768 with CentOS 5, once the xorg.conf file from
Knoppix 5.1.1 is moved over.


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