scottco229 wrote:

I currently run Centos on my Dell 1501 AMD Duel Core 1900 _86x64 Inspiron Laptop. I am limited to Centos as this appears to be the only distro that can manage my ATI graphics card. Fedora, Mandriva, openSuzie, Freespire, Linuxmint...wont work.

I get the dreaded gray streaked screen...and the system freezes...any ideas in what I can do. I can install fedora from a live cd, but I cant actually get to log in before I lose the screen.

make sure you boot into runlevel 3 (text-only), instead of going to 5 (which is the graphical login manager and X).

1. at the grub prompt, press any key to interrupt the auto-boot
2. use the arrow keys to highlight the kernel you want
3. press 'a' key to modify the line
4. at the end of the line, put a 3
5. hit [Enter] to boot into runlevel 3

You should be at a login prompt. Log in as root. Now you can muck with X. Try this to generate a temporary X config file:

X -configure

Then test it with:

X -config /root/xorg.conf.new

Also try updating drivers - for me (on Fedora) that would be:

yum update xorg-x11-drv-ati

First of all, ATI driver installation is hell; no matter how you do it, it hardly ever works unless you're just magically luckily inclined to win at life.

Note: I've only had success doing this with a fresh install. If I'm upgrading; I'll just run the installer without building the package; sometimes... hah, sometimes it works.

What I do is download ATI's drivers from their website.

Then, I navagate to the location of the file; and run this in the terminal while logged in as root::

./ati*.deb --buildpkg Debian/lenny

fill in the "Debian/lenny" with whatever distro you are using

when it finishes, go back into the terminal and type::

dpkg -i fglr*.deb

and I let it install the programs, if you get diversion problems; go into synaptic and remove all of the drivers and install the fglrx-driver from the contrib non-free repository. Then uninstall them; it should reset the status of your libGL.so.1 file so it no longer erros upon installation.

then type::

aticonfig --initial

to configure xorg.conf

Good luck. I've spent hours working with ATI Drivers before out of frustration. Remember, you can always set it back to the way it was by copying and pasting your original xorg.conf file so it sets it back to default.

Troubleshooting::

remove and reinstall xserver-xorg
remove and reinstall fglrx-driver fglrx-source fglrx-kernel fglrx-module

remove all items related to fglrx in synaptic, run apt-get update, then apt-get install -f and try again.

It's a process; I assure you.

scottco229 wrote:

I tried, to edit the boot command, however it still goes to the gray streaked screen. I was able to update my ATI drivers, but still no success.

is the box networked / can you ssh in?

when you say "tried to edit the boot command", does that mean you actually did edit it? can you type exactly what the line looks like? mine would look like this, e.g.

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-34.EL ro root=LABEL=/ 3

if there is any "vga=xxx", erase it. also remove "rhgb" or "quiet", if they are listed.