Friday, July 31, 2009

Steps for getting X-Gnome working...

1) Make sure you have your kernel compiled with atleast the following options enabled:
  • Device Drivers -> Graphics support -> Direct Rendering Manager
  • Device Drivers -> Graphics support -> Display Device Support
  • Device Drivers -> Graphics support ->
  • PCI (graphics card is usually on the PCI bus)

2) With my card, I had to add the following kernel commandline so that the driver initialised my video card at init : "video=matroxfb:init,vesa:0x11B" (I have a Matrox G550 card)

With the above two steps done, you should be able to see a console on the monitor.

3) Now, install the Gnome and X server package groups (atleast the packages listed under "mandatory".
Gnome:
PolicyKit-gnome
control-center
fedora-gnome-theme
gnome-applets
gnome-panel
gnome-session
gnome-terminal
gvfs-fuse
metacity
nautilus
yelp
gdm

X:
bitmap-fonts
desktop-backgrounds-basic
xorg-x11-drivers
xorg-x11-server-Xorg
xorg-x11-xauth
xorg-x11-xinit
)


4) Now, install the "system-config-display" package and run "system-config-display --reconfig" as root to generate xorg.conf. It generates this configuration file as some temporary file, so, copy it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It usually contains only generic stuff. So you might want to edit it. Eg. My xorg.conf was trying to use the fbdev driver (since, I had Matrox's fbdev support enabled in the kernel). So, I edited Xorg.conf to use the "mga" driver (Matrox driver). etc

5) Install "firstboot" and run it manually so that it configures your keyboard and authentication. Optionally add a user using useradd. Make sure that /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and /etc/pam.d/* files are generated.

6) Now just run startx or init 5. Things should just work.
(you'd probably have to start HAL daemon manually and tinker with stuff here and there. But, this is the essence of what is required to get X up)

Also, you might want to edit inittab so that the next you reboot, you are presented with a graphical interface.

Let me know if you succeed in getting it working or have some issues :)

2 comments:

  1. If you only initially want to do X, system-config-display complained that system-config-keyboard wasn't there. It really wants to run them in X itself, so I used tiger-vncserver to another machine to do the configuration (it worked).

    I was running in a chroot environment, so I had to kill udev in the outside and restart it within the fedora environment and run hald manually (I plan on fixing this but it helps to be able to do things manually)

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  2. I should mention this is on the chumby hacker board

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