Getting Intel 945 graphics to work in F10

by Jonas Anden — last modified Dec 08, 2008 02:15 PM

The 82945G graphics chip appears to have problems with the 'intel' driver provided by the xorg-x11-drv-i810 in Fedora 10. Luckily, the older driver from Fedora 9 works much better.

This document describes possible workarounds for a bug in the Fedora 10 release of the xorg-x11-drv-810 package. The bug is reported upstream as bug 467986 in RedHat bug database.

Applicable Fedora Versions

Fedora 10 (i386 tested)

Requirements

Fedora 10 installed and booted.
Root shell attained

Post-install problem solving

When the system boots up after installation, the user ends up with a blank screen. This is because the X11 driver fails to set up the system. There are a couple of ways around this:

Option 1: Use the vesa driver instead of the intel driver
This option will give you standard functionality with a generic driver and is the safest approach. This driver gave me a slow 4:3 output on my widescreen display.

Enter runlevel 3
```
# init 3
```

Generate an xorg.conf file

# system-config-display --noui --reconfig

Replace the 'intel' driver with the 'vesa' driver
```
# sed -i 's/intel/vesa/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
```
Enter runlevel 5
```
# init 5
```

Option 2: Disable acceleration in the intel driver.
This option will give you a hardware-specific driver, but with no acceleration. This driver gave me a slow widescreen output on my widescreen display.

Enter runlevel 3
```
# init 3
```

Generate an xorg.conf file:

# system-config-display --noui --reconfig

Add the 'NoAccel' option to the driver section (this is all one line)

# sed -i '/intel/a\\        Option      "NoAccel"' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Enter runlevel 5
```
# init 5
```

Option 3: Use the intel driver from Fedora 9.
This will give you a fully functioning, hardware-accelerated driver. This driver gave me a fast widescreen output on my widescreen display.

Enter runlevel 3
```
# init 3
```
Install the driver from Fedora 9 (this is all one line)
```
# rpm -Uvh --oldpackage http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/9/i386.newkey/xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.3.2-3.fc9.i386.rpm
```
The above is the latest version for i386 Fedora 9 at the time of this writing, and with the kernel.org mirrors being distributed all over the world, the above download site should be pretty quick.
Enter runlevel 5
```
# init 5
```

Useful tips

To get a login prompt from the console when the system has booted, press Ctrl-Alt-F2.

Disclaimer

I use my system to run a MythTV frontend, so I only use 2D-acceleration. I'm using option 3, as this gives me a radically lower CPU usage as compared to the other two.

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