I'm afraid I've been bad

FC5 will not support the 8800 without the installation of the latest (or at least more recent!) Nvida drivers. Knoppix will be booting with the VESA drivers which is why it will boot OK for you. You might be able to boot the FC5 disc the same way by specifying a boot peramiter. Have a look at the options when you boot from the disc.

As I understand from your mail you want to use the FC5 install to run K3B so you can burn a dual layer DVD image of your XP installation and then blast the FC5 to install Ubuntu. To my mind forget about taking the backup. Blast the FC5 install with Ubuntu, install K3B and then burn your DVD. From talking to you before you know enough not to blast the wrong partition. I also know you are too busy at the minute to waste a week getting to the finer points of xconf hacking.

Just a thought - can you not use XP to burn the DVD image so that you do have the backup?

Thanks gents for the kind wisdom. For some reason I thought I had tried to access the EXT2 partition from WinXP in the past but didn't have much success in setting it up. However a quick Google solved my woes and I was able to transfer the image file into XP. I've seem to have misplaced my notes on the exact commands I used to restore the XP partition using the dd command but there is plenty of information available for that on the net.

I just find it very strange that the FC5 install disk wouldn't switch to vesa mode either. I mean I messed around with the xorg.conf file and didn't get anywhere[/bull-chinashop] but I figured booting up the install disk should run a basic VGA or VESA driver for installation purposes instead it acted in the exact way as if I booted into FC5 install. Weird.

@linux_0 I know you're a big advocate for Fedora but for some reason the Fedora distros have seemed watered down to me. Not that my Linux experience is vast (FC3 and FC5 is it gents) but I want to give another flavor a try. It's not like I can never go back to Fedora without a lot of trouble (ahh...opensource). That Pulse Audio reads interesting but I'm not sure it is a feature I would ever use.

What I do want is distro that has excellent support for media playback out of the "box". IIRC, the basic media players that shipped with Fedora didn't support MP3 playback or DVD playback and had limited video media support. I had to install a few additional features which wasn't a big deal, but I would prefer not to have to go through it all again. I'm planning on building a small secondary system for my girlfriend's son to use for basic internet and schoolwork stuff and I'm using this install as a dry run to get everything sorted for his install.

One more thing. My Knoppix LiveCD is old, V4.0. Was there a problem with that version and DSL modems???? It seems to wreak havoc on them as in I have to reset the modem and reacquire the DSL signal sometimes after using it. I plan on updating to a later version, but I was just curious.

Try the ubuntu 7.10 alternate CD and install in text mode.

After the install you can grab the nvidia driver and get your GUI back

AV, I tried different resolutions and they didn't work but I didn't try the additional boot options so I'll give that a shot as I think I know the option you're talking about. I just find it weird that Fedora and Ubuntu don't seem to recognize the card and default to vesa when my ancient copy of Knoppix has no issues using the vesa driver.

If AV's suggestion doesn't work then I'll try linux-0's method but I'm just warning you, I'm probably going to need help with a command line install as well as setting up the right repository to get the correct NV driver once the install is finished from the command line.[/lowly GUI loser]

Sorry AV, but your suggestion didn't work.

According to this it does indeed look as though Ubuntu doesn't natively work with an 8800 series card:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSup [...] ardsNvidia

The only 8800 card listed is the 8800GT but the comments match exactly what happens to me. Perhaps it would be best to wait until 8.4 next month?

However, I could go the text install route and try this guy's method of installing the NV drivers:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=514161

Looks like this info could be a bit helpful as well:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-f [...] users.html

I don't know, what do you guys think? Should I give the text install a shot and try the instructions from above or, should I just wait and see what happens when 8.4 comes out????

Decisions...(begins downloading)...decisions...(alternate CD)....decisions.

Seconded. The text based install is not that bad a ride. In fact it gives you more flexibility as to which applications you install. Whilst the defaults are good I still end up removing some applications to replace them with my favourites when done. The text based install reminds me of the old NT4 install process so if you can do that you should be fine.

As far as native support goes you will be out of luck untill an open source Nvida driver that supports the 8xxx series is out there. Untill then the best you can hope for is VESA support and a smooth way to install the required drivers.

Keep us posted

If you want to preserve your data do not format your existing Fedora 5 partition but move the existing data out of the way.

GL