About two plus weeks ago my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card died on me. It was a sad sad day in Fergyville. The mayor of town gave a heart-filled eulogy and instructed all residences to put their flags at half mast. I found a spare video card and saw it had a VGA port. So; I then ordered a DVI (f) to VGA (m) adapter from Cables for Less and waited another couple days for it to arrive. When it finally arrived, low and behold my spare video card was actually an AGP card and my motherboard only has PCI Express slots. I went spiraling down into a very deep depression (for about 2 minutes). I’ve been without my Linux partition for roughly two weeks and it was driving me insane.

When all hope was lost, I accidentally realized that my motherboard has an on-board video port. How could I have missed that!? I’ve disregarded on-board video for so long that I no longer see them when working on my computer. I was happy to see it, but when I loaded my Linux partition, I didn’t get nice, clear graphics. Instead I got fuzzy and impossible to work with X session.

It Works on… Windows!?

It’s kind of hard for me to admit this, but the on-board video DOES work in my Vista partition. I installed the drivers from the motherboard CD and to my surprise I was able to play Battlefield 2 (low specs though). How can this be… Windows should NEVER trump Linux… that’s just LAW!

Fedora 12, My Hero!

I spent the next couple of days on IRC and countless search results on how to fix this matter. Most of the responses were to try out Fedora 12 and see if it works then. I was very reluctant to do that. I finally got Fedora 11 all tweaked out the way I wanted and Linux distros really aren’t the best thing to do an upgrade on. It’s always best to do a clean install. I wasn’t ready to do that again. Someone suggested I at least try the Fedora 12 LiveCD. I thought, “yeah, that should be too difficult to do.”

I downloaded the 600+MB file within a matter of minutes and loaded it onto a USB drive. To my surprise, X worked. I immediately installed XChat and told my friends on #fedora-social. So; I then backed up my home directory and preceded to install a fresh copy of Fedora 12.

Always Learning

One of the greatest benefits to running Linux full-time is the learning aspect of it. I’m so used to doing a full DVD install of the distro that I take for granted what’s NOT installed if I was to scale back a bit. For example, I did a LiveCD install. It went fairly quick, but then I realized that some of the apps I’m used to having weren’t installed. No worries, just YUM the mess out of the terminal and I’m back in business. What I’ve learned this go around are the names of these vital GUI applications I’ve become dependent on. Damn I love Linux!

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