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!

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.

So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

I had a headache that night too, but I was determined to get this newer version running. After I took care of my family duties (kids, wife, blah blah) – I jumped on my machine and verified the ISO file I downloaded about a week after the release of Sulphur. Everything went well, I burned it to a DVD at 2.4x speed. Awh did it hurt to click “Burn” at that speed, but I found other stuff to do. Once it was finished I rebooted and started the process.

It took a long time to upgrade, so I went downstairs and watched some South Park with my brother. It was around 1:00 AM when I decided to go to bed. The process was almost finished, but I didn’t have any energy left to complete the process.

In the morning I saw the beautiful “congratulations” screen and rebooted the machine. The first thing that shows you something is wrong is I didn’t get a neat little splash screen while the processes were loading. I’ve learned that that has something to do with Xserver. It then tried to give me a login screen, but kept blinking out. I clicked the <ENTER> key and I saw a text login. All signs that Xserver is not running. I logged in, typed “startx”, waited, and recieved this error message:

giving up
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to Xserver
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.

Yah, no one likes to see those kind of messages. I’m researching it now on Fedora Forums. I do have a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card AND I am using their propritary drivers (no luck with Lvina). So stay tuned for more adventures in me messing things up!

I’m having a hard time understanding what makes Livna so hot, in the linux-world.  To my understanding they are better than getting videocard drivers from nVidia’s web site because they are opensource and when you install the latest kernel update – your card won’t go bonk!? on you.  As for me, I’ve been using nVidia’s propriatory drivers because that’s the only way I get World of Warcraft or any other video game to work.

The only issue that I have to deal with right now IS, when my kernel is updated.  I have to run through the Xserver configuration.  Once I get into my desktop, I would then switch back to my propriatory drivers or CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE back out to a full shell environment to reinstall them.  It is a bit of a hassle, but I have yet to jump on the band wagon of Livna.

A GUI is a very complex piece of software and there could be any number of reasons why it would lock up on you. If you need to kill your x server and then restart it, here are some tips:

Killing X server via Terminal

Open a Terminal (ex: gnome-terminal) and type:

# init 3

That will kill the x server and throw you into runlevel 3 mode (all text).  If it doesn’t find the command, then switch to the root user by typing “su -” (you will need to know the root password).

Restarting X server

If you need to restart the X server, and you’re in GUI mode, simply use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. For the most part, it’ll work.

Working with a Console

If the previous keyboard combination did not work then try CTRL+ALT+F1. This will not kill X server, it will simply open a full screen console. I believe Red Hat and Fedora Core have F1-F6 as options. If you want to switch back to a GUI environment use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+F7.

Processes

Once you’re in the full screen console mode, you will have to use the kill command to close X server. Unfortunately; you can’t simply type in “kill xserver”. You’ll have to find it’s process ID, using the ps command. The ps command displays a list of the current processes running on the machine. There are tons of options for this command, use man ps to find which option works for your situation.

Once you found the process ID for the process you want to end, type in kill {process_id}. Let’s assume your process id is 1344. You will type kill 1344 and presto that process is no longer functioning.

Init Command

If you want to get out of the full screen console and into a bonafied console environment, use the init command.

• init 3 – kills all processes and loads the user into a full console.
• init 5 – runs the multi-user and GUI scripts in rc.d/rc5, which will start your login manager and put you back into a GUI environment.

Starting X server

Once you have X server killed, or no longer running – you can either type in init 5 or startx to get X server up and running again. If all else fails, simply reboot.

How I Came Up with This Tip

I ran into this issue when I installed a free copy of GTA 2 (Grand Theft Auto 2) from Rockstar Games [slash] classics. I was informed about that link from The Linux Link Tech Show podcast. I had no problems installing the game but I am having issues after the game starts. It seems to resize my desktop to roughly a 640×480 resolution. I haven’t figured it out yet. I did a search on www.google.com/linux and found a PDF document from Whil Hentzen (PDF – 349KB) and it did a great job of explaining a couple different methods of killing X server. I encourage everyone to save a copy of Whil’s whitepaper on your hard drive.