problems with fedora 9

howdy all,
i have a small (maybe bigger) problem. I’ve installed on my laptop (in a sun virtualbox) fedora core 9 and that works fine (befor i touched it), but I had just a problem with the monitor resolution because my laptop has an max. resolution of 1280 x 800 and fedora had just standards like 1280 x 1024.
So i decided to change my resolution to my normal of 1280x800 and changed something in the administration tab (changed the graphic card to my normal ati mobile radeon hd 3400 and the monitor to 1280x800). so the system needed after my changes to reboot and after the reboot I have just the command line of fedora and when i try to start with “startx” I’ve got an error (look to the attachment)
so is there some way to fix my system? (okay it’s just installed on a virtual machine, but i don’t want to install fedora new after i breaked the system :D)
Is it possible to start fedora with some command line for safe mode or something like that?

cheers

Hi,

If you’re running Fedora in VirtualBox then you must use the VB video driver NOT the hosts’ hardware. Remember it’s a Virtual pc and doesn’t use the physical hardware (that’s why 3D acceleration doesn’t work).

I’m not a Fedora user, but when it begins to boot (grub or lilo) you should be able to edit the boot line and start it in init 3 (add a 3 to the end of the boot line) to get to a terminal login prompt. Use a terminal based text editor (nano, vi) to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (MAKE A BACKUP COPY FIRST!). Scroll down to the “Section “Device”” section which refers to the video card. Under that will be the entry “Driver”. Right now yours probably says ATI something. Change it to “vboxvideo” (Yes, include the quotes). Save and reboot.

These instructions would work on most Debian based systems. My apologies but I’m not certain if everything is located in the same places on Fedora. :slight_smile:

thanks scrooge! :slight_smile:
but now I’ve an error more
driver “vboxvideo” is unknown
hmm realy strange

Wait, did you install the Guest Additions before? Come to think of it vboxvideo may only be there if they were installed. My bad.

In the VB screen on the host system go to Details, CD/DVD-ROM, select the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso, start the virtual machine. If you’re still stuck in the terminal screen you’ll have to (do as root) mount the CD, change to that directory and run sh VBoxLinuxAdditions???.run The ??? is because with 2.0 onward VB has separate guest additions for x86 and 64 bit guests. If it installs okay you’ll have to reboot.

If you have a problem you can always try replacing the driver in xorg.conf with something generic like “vesa”.

big thanks scrooge!
I’ve changed the driver to vesa and it works! :slight_smile:
:cheers:

so i can try to change my resolution to 1280x800. I found with google an article that says, that’s enough to add the resolution to xorg.conf. so i think i have a try

BTW I installed FC9 in VB and discovered that there is a conflict with FC9 and the vboxvideo driver so don’t even try it without a lot more research. You can install guest additions but you won’t have seamless mode or dynamic resizing. :frowning:

It also seems quite slow in VB, but I didn’t have time to play with RAM and video memory settings.:slight_smile:

and when i install fc9 normal and not in a virtualbox, could i change than my resolution without problems?

You should be able to with no problems. In VB you are dealing with a virtual video card which in this case has conflicts with FC9. If your physical computer has any sort of normal video card then it should work perfectly. Have you tried booting it as a live cd? If in doubt ask on the Fedora forums to check on your video cards’ compatibility.
:slight_smile: