Logging in on Fedora 19 shows nothing but a grey screen

I've recently installed Fedora 19 on a (rather low-end) desktop. The installation gave me no reason whatsoever to believe that there was anything wrong going on, so I'm assuming it went fine 100%.

After booting up the PC and logging on, the screen shows nothing but a grey background, with the Fedora logo on the bottom. I can move the mouse, but nothing else shows.

I thought this was simply the result of using a Celeron processor - perhaps it's too slow. But after waiting an hour, nothing happened. So, I looked this up on the net, and it appears to be a fairly common bug - in the alpha and beta software - concerning the GDM (Gnome desktop manager?). My knowledge of Linux is little - of Gnome, less so.

I pressed Ctrl + Alt + F2, logged in as my user, and entered startx, which did show the desktop, though with several complications:

After using the command startx, the Fedora desktop shows up.
I can use the desktop for quite a while, but sooner or later, it goes all black.
I'm taken back to the logon screen. But for some reason, the desktop flashes itself.
I now have two mouse pointers; one for the logon screen, and one for the desktop.
At this point, I click on my username in the desktop (I time it, during the flashes), and click restart.

I'd be fine with using the CLI for startx (besides the complications), but I've got other users to worry about, so it would be best if I could set it up such that they wouldn't need to tackle the CLI just yet.

I'm very sorry if my experience with Linux is limited. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.

For reference, here's what I'm using:

Fedora Live Desktop x86-64 Release 19
Intel Celeron, 2.66Ghz
1GB of RAM
Asrock 775i65g
No dedicated graphics card

My research leads me to believe that Fedora (?) blacklisted some graphics cards, and mine is possibly one of them. The bug reports suggested trying to switch Gnome for... KDE(?), but this being Linux, these bug reports are all Greek to me.

These bugs appear to happen on the Alpha and Beta version.

zack_falcon

Posted 2013-10-07T08:58:00.160

Reputation: 903

Answers

It seems likely that the default display you set is not compatible with the graphics card that is in the system; this is a relatively common problem, not just with Fedora. So once you are in the system, change the display to something very basic like a generic 800x600, and restart, and it should come up with a visible display.

Debra

Posted 2013-10-07T08:58:00.160

Reputation: 4 000

How do I change the display (via command line?)? I've read some stuff on the net about how GDM blacklisted some cards, and it is likely mine is one of those blacklisted; I'm not sure of how to work around this, though. – zack_falcon – 2013-10-08T02:53:59.637

You can try to start the X Configuration Tool, with the command "system-config-display". I'm not sure if that will work (gui) in your situation. You could also try editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually. – Debra – 2013-10-08T03:06:14.383

"system-config-display" doesn't work. Also, there is no xorg.conf file in that directory. I think this is Fedora at work - according to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_xorg.conf, Fedora versions 10 and above no longer creates the Xorg.conf file. My attempts to manually create it has failed as well.

– zack_falcon – 2013-10-08T05:51:10.523

My experience with Fedora 20: it worked fine all through to first boot after installation. At the next boot, Xorg was messed up so you only get the Fedora logo in a dark field. Ctrl-Alt-F2 gave me a tty, I log in and find that kernel-headers is apparently a version higher than the rest (3.15 as against the original 3.11). I tried downgrading that to match but no luck. Based on another forum post, I did a yum update to upgrade everything on it, did a reboot, and now everything is fine.

Jeff Tan

Posted 2013-10-07T08:58:00.160

Reputation: 11