GNOME 3 failing on old Dell Dimension 8100

asked 2012-02-01 18:22:31 -0500

KDuff
27 ●6 ●6 ●9

updated 2013-06-06 03:10:40 -0500

bochecha

596 ●5 ●16 ●23 http://bochecha.fedora...

Hello All:

I burned the fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop image to a CD and I am using it to boot my Dell Dimension 8100.

If I do a straight boot Fedora starts but only the background appears. If I click around on the background things happen, but no dialog boxes appear.

If I do a trouble shooting boot into a minimal GUI I get the following message:

GMONE 3 failed to load. Most likely your system graphics hardware is not capable of delivering the full GNOME 3 experience.

But I do get a desktop with working menus. Progress

Under Windows it says I have a NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Display Adapter. The original Dell build sheet says the card is a 32MB DDR NVIDIA Graphic Card.

So my questions are:

Can I get GNOME 3 to work or is the graphics card just too old?

I see the option on the Fedora 16 menus to install to the hard drive. Will the install allow me to zap an old Fedora 4 partition? Will the install be smart enough to deal with the graphics issue. I do not need the latest, greatest and coolest desktop.

Many thanks for your attention to this issue.

Best Regards

KD

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

1

answered 2012-02-02 10:07:22 -0500

xeranas

126 ●1 ●1 ●10

updated 2012-02-02 10:29:13 -0500

GNOME 3 failed to load - but I do get a desktop with working menus.

If your graphics card doesn't support 3d-acceleration, Gnome 3 automatically runs the fallback-mode (read more). Do not forget that also exist Fedora with other desktop environments (check full list). In your case I would recommend try with LXDE or Xfce Spin.

Fedora 16 installation can use previous Linux partition. Depend on your choice you can make clean install (it would remove old operation system) or Install next to existing operation system. Since Fedora 4 is pretty old, I would like recommend clean Install. Also make sure that your computer meets installation requirements (e.g. needs at least least 768MB memory (RAM)).

I believe that Fedora will handle your graphics card automatically (using open source drivers) and you should not run into graphics issues, however I can not 100% guaranteed that.