I have seen a lot of posts at various Fedora forums where the questions sometimes start with, "it does not work...". Well, sometimes the user may really not know what is wrong and will default to a questions such as the above. What do you do when "it does not work"? Let's look at some of the troubleshooting tools that are available to us even if the system is not working as they say.
One of the first things to realize is that, unless there is serious hardware defects, it is very rare that the system does not work. While it may seem that it is not working, given that any Linux distribution is so complex that it may actually be working while it seems to the user that it is not. Case in point, when one uses the ATI drivers for the video on this machine, the screen will invariably come up blank and it will not be working. However, you have to realize at this point is that the video driver is not working while the system is booting fine.
One of the premier reasons why you would not be able to do anything with your machine is because of video problems. It is also a problem that stops you dead on your track if after installation, your system only shows a blank screen and it may seem like nothing is working. This may not be an issue in the Windows world since (if Windows is not loaded on your machine) when you boot, it will boot to a generic screen. Some Linux distributions try to be clever and load drivers based on what they detect as your video card. More often than not, the installer is correct and you are greeted with a welcome screen, albeit maybe a lower resolution than your card is capable of generating.
In any case if your video is not working, you have to bypass the video driver currently in use. To do this you will have to know how the computer is booted. (For the technical minded, I am only going to discuss booting GRUB and not LILO). Once the computer finishes POST (Power On Self Testing), it will display the grub screen (for a fixed number of seconds). All this is controlled by a file called grub.conf which is usually located in the grub directory in the boot directory). What you need to realize is that you can pause this booting process and pass various boot parameters before the computer continues to boot!
Once the grub screen is visible, hit any key to stop it from booting the defaults kernel. This will bring you to the boot menu which will show you the various kernels available to boot (see resources). Once you are at this screen, you can decide to boot another kernel or add boot parameters to the current kernel or to other kernels. To do this, move the highlight selector with the up and down keys, hit enter to select the kernel you want to boot. Highlight the line starting with kernel, and hit the "e" key to edit the entry. Now, place the cursor at the end of the line, enter a space and add the parameters you want. See resources for all possible parameters you can pass to the kernel.
One of the most important parameter we will want to enter is the runlevel. To boot to a commandline, we will want to boot to a run level less than 5. The most common is 3 to start the network and bring up the shell. Log in as root. Now things get a little hairy since you may not be familiar with any of the text editors that are available to you to modify the configuration files. The file that you are most likely going to edit is
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg,conf.old Once you do that, start the GUI with the command
startx
What will happen at this stage is that the GUI (X-windows) will attempt to start the GUI with defaults that are built into the system. This may not work. For your convenience, I have included a generic xorg.conf which should work on this machine. However, the best way to handle this is to learn to use one of the editors like Emacs that will work without a GUI. The basic commands to remember are
emacs filename #to edit a file
Cntrl-x-s #to save a file - means use the control and "x" and "s" keys simultaneously
Cntrl-x-w #to write to another file
Cntrl-k #to delete to end of the line
Cntrl-y #to undelete the deleted line
Cntrl-x-c #to quit
If you forget the root password, you will want runlevel 1. This will bring you directly to the command prompt. Now simply give the command
passwd
and choose a new password for root.
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