Hello, I've had a fair share of problems making a my PowerColor ATI Radeon 7500 card to work with Mandrake 9.0. Maybe 9 times out of 10 X would not initialize properly, with the display going to sleep. Running with the VESA server worked, but only provided 60Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024.
I decided to take the bull by the horns and compile a CVS version. In order to do it cleanly as possible, I took the Mandrake 9.0 XFree86 src rpm, ripped off most of the patches and replaced the source with XFree86 CVS version. After a few iterations I managed a cleanly build an rpm that also installs without problem. Now, if it would also work, that would be nice. For some yet unknown reason, when booting the default linux X dies hard with this XFree86 4.2.99.2 from CVS. Post-mortem, XFree86.0.log contains mostly some binary garbage. If I on the other hand boot with the failsafe method, which appears from lilo.conf to be the same kernel, with different options, X works and is stable. I can later in the boot process select "Text with Networking", login, and type startx to work normally. Virtual consoles work, refresh rate is 84Hz @1280x1024x32, everything in 2D seems to work fine. So what is the actual difference between the failsafe and the normal boot methods? I tried editing inittab to have the default runlevel to be 3, and then typing startx, but that also froze X. Any ideas? -Harri
