Fedora 8: out of range

Sam Varghese
Monday, 12 November 2007 20:16

Opinion and Analysis

One of the most curious things about Linux distributions is the markedly different way in which one or the other behaves when it comes to installation. This has been brought home to me over the past week as I've been trying to get a Fedora 8 installation sorted out.
While I settled on using Debian a long time ago, I often run other distributions on a test PC. A few days before version 8 of Fedora was released, I downloaded version 7 and tried to install it on this PC.

I use the word "tried" advisedly, for nothing I did then - nor anything I have done in the days until today - has resulted in my being able to configure a graphical interface for this beast.

The test PC has plain bog standard hardware - it has an all-in-one Gigabyte motherboard. The graphics chip is an nVIDIA GeForce 6100. The network card (again onboard) is a Realtek 8201 and the sound is provided by a Realtek ALC883 chip. The monitor I use is a Benq FP222W, an LCD which works perfectly with my own PC (running 64-bit Debian) via a KVM.

Fedora stubbornly refuses to sport a graphical interface no matter what I do - the only thing I get is an irritating message which tells me "out of range."

Before I outline what I've done to try and rectify the situation, let me point out that this PC is just eight months old. In its short lifespan, it has, at various times and for varying periods, run Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva, PLLinuxOS, Windows Vista, and Slackware.

In the case of all these Linux distributions, I have had to tweak things a bit to get a GUI that uses the native resolution of the monitor - some distributions have given me 1024 x 768 through the set-up program; I've then tweaked things manually to get 1680 x 1050 which is the native resolution my monitor supports.