I finally figured out that the reason the motherboard I purchased for a MythTV box (Intel BOXDQ965GFEKR, ala DQ956GF) was kernel panicing at every boot, on every distro, with:
EIP: [] __modify_IO_APIC_irq+0x28/0x5a SS:ESP 0068:df5ece78
Had to do with the second (PCI) video card defaulting to primary in the BIOS. I switched the BIOS to force the internal video to be primary and the Fedora 8 LiveCD booted normally (BIOS bug or kernel bug?).
OK, no it didn’t, it couldn’t detect the internal video card, but at least it didn’t kernel panic. So, I got a text login prompt, logged in as root (no password) and ran system-config-display, set it for the intel driver, 800×600, and that seems to get me an X session at least with startx. From there I could run the installer from the desktop.
Once the system booted, I was treated to a ‘bad block’ error message from my root drive mirror. I got dropped to repair shell, ran fsck -c on all the partitions, and found nothing wrong. SMART was fine, no dmesg complaints, and fsck didn’t need to do any repairs. Upon reboot, all was well. Coincidentally the RAID-1 rebuild finished, but that shouldn’t have had any effect. Weird.
Anyway, video was still not working right, so I decided to build the Intel open source drivers for their modern graphics chips. Here is a summary of the commands I ran to get it going (logged in as root):
yum -y install git autoconf make gcc libtool gcc-c++ libXau-devel xorg-x11-proto-devel xorg-x11-server-sdk libXext-devel libXvMC-devel libdrm-devel
mkdir -p drivers/graphics/intel
cd drivers/graphics/intel
git-clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel
git-clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa
git-clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm
cd drm
./autogen.sh && make && make install
cd ../xf86-video-intel/
./autogen.sh && make && make install
system-config-display
Then I was able to chose the proper resolution, and make sure the intel driver was still selected. It didn’t pick up the hardware name, but it seems to work OK. Exiting out of this, run:
init 5 && exit
And have some working graphics. The 965 graphics are just for the console – S-Video will be output on an nVidia card. If I hit any snags there will be more posts here.