getting My ATI Radeon Video Card to work in Fedora 5

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The PC used for the install is an old 500mhz, 8gig, ~200mb ram system built back in 1998. I just happened to to have a Radeon 128 Rage Pro card laying around so i decided to use it.

I also was doing an upgrade from Fedora 1 to Fedora 5 but that ended up being a disaster so i had to do a clean install. Anyway, after the install, the system starts up fine but X Server would not start. Ther error message was that

X Server failed to Start. Device was not found

As suggested by a few people, i updated my kernel but this did nothing. i thought about using the ATI driver but with all the bad things i kept reading about it, i decided against it.

Anyway, first check the config file for X.

The config file is at /etc/X11/xorg.conf

the default setup was

Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "sis" VendorName "Videocard vendor" BoardName "SIS ........" EndSection

For some reason, Fedora could not configure the ATI driver and kept using the "sis" driver.

All it takes is opening up that file and changing the "sis" to "ati". Other options for ATI drivers are "r128", for Rage and "radeon" for Radeon drivers. "radeon" worked for me but i had better results with "ati".

type
Startx

to start the X server

Now, if you happen to be having the same problem but have a different video card;

to figure out what video card you have. type the following at a command prompt

/sbin/lspci | grep -i vga

it should print out something like:

VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD [Radeon 7200]

That will give you the name of the driver you have. Go to http://wiki.x.org/wiki/VideoDrivers
and find your video card in that list. The name of the driver should be the linked text, eg, for the ATI drivers, its not "ATI" but one of the sub-items(ati,atimisc,r128,radeon). open up the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and edit it.

vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

mouse down to

Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "sis" VendorName "Videocard vendor" BoardName "SIS ........" EndSection

then edit the Driver line (press "i" to edit and when done press "esc" then type ":wq", with no quotes then press enter.)

Start X and hopefully it should work.

Startx

If not you have a different problem to deal with.

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getting My ATI Radeon Video Card to work in Fedora 5