Captain Support: Not to the rescue…

 

This morning, the display on one of my computers was a bit odd. I rebooted the machine and when it came up I got no output on the monitor. I plugged my laptop into the monitor and that worked fine, so it looked like the graphics card had died. I popped down to a local PC store and had the choice of remortgaging my house for new graphics card, or buying a cheap and cheerful one. I did the latter. Even so, the new card was much flasher than the old one.

I put the card in the machine and it booted up and I had a display again. Trouble was, GNOME shell had failed to start and I was knocked back into fallback mode, that looks a bit like GNOME2. Sigh. Forgot to check the the card against support for the ever-so-picky GNOME shell.

I now have a choice to make:

  • Ditch it and get a new graphics card… again…
  • Switch to KDE or XFCE… shudder…
  • Stay with the fallback option until Fedora 17, when allegedly GNOME shell will not be so bloody fussy.

I’m probably going to stick with the last option as I can’t be bothered to waste any more time on this. All of a sudden, Windows and Mac OS X don’t seem so bad after all…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I don’t need a lecture on why GNOME shell is so picky. I know all the arguments. I’ve read all the crap. Doesn’t mean it’s not a pain in the ass when you buy a newer and more powerful graphics card and you end up with an inferior user experience.

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

4 thoughts on “Captain Support: Not to the rescue…”

  1. Agreed. Getting a decent display on X in Linux has always been too difficult.

    20 years and counting.

  2. I’m not a pro in GNOME shell, but it looks like you just need to reconfigure your X system. Why don’t you try to find help with it on fedora forums?

  3. Hi.

    I spent a lot of time in it on one of my other servers. Also with a newer and better graphics card. The Fedora and GNOME forums basically say, “tough, you got the wrong graphics card”. It’s all down the the drivers. The ones supplied by Fedora do not recognize the 3D acceleration on some cards. The manufacturers drivers don’t play well with GNOME 3.

    The solution is for the manufacturers to release their drivers as open source, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon for that.

    Cheers

    Tim…

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