[PlanetCCRMA] White screen of (near) death with rt kernel (Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop, multi-boot Fedora 19 / Windows Vista)

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On 08/28/2013 06:20 PM, wleeds at comcast.net wrote:
>
> My Dell Inspiron 1501 (Radeon Xpress 200M) boots a non-realtime kernel
> (3.10.7-200.fc19.x86_64) into LXDE just fine (with the nomodeset boot
> option), but with 3.8.13-201.rt14.1.fc19.ccrma.x86_64.rt, instead of the
> desktop being displayed, a (typically mostly) white screen is
> displayed.  I know Linux is operating "under there" because i can
> blindly shift to a text console (ctl-alt-f2), login, and issue "sudo
> service lightdm restart", which 1 out of about 100 times will result in
> a functional desktop.  I've tried numerous boot options, which have
> occasionally, but inconsistently helped.

What kind of messages do you get in /var/log/messages or in the Xorg log 
when it fails? (/var/log/X11/Xorg*) Anything video related that might be 
of relevance?

>It appears that the vesa
> driver, rather than a radeon driver, is operating.  Any suggestions for
> getting my desktop to come up consistently?  Thanks.  Wayne.

Maybe 3.8.x is too old for your hardware... (video hardware, that is).

Just a day or so ago I released a 3.10.x rt patched kernel for fc19, 
maybe trying that would help?
-- Fernando