I was installing the latest Fedora 21 via Unetbootin-built USB and had an issue with monitors. They were in a vertical position and could not be easily rotated. I did not have a spare monitor to attach in a horizontal orientation.
The machine in question had a Nvidia GT 730 graphic card. By default Xorg chooses to use nouveau drivers. For some reason, they do not allow the rotation of the screen via xrandr – the output was:
$ xrandr -q ... default connected 1920x1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm ... $ xrandr --output default --rotate left xrandr: output default cannot use rotation "left" reflection "none"
I tried installing proprietary nvidia drivers, using the instructions here:
However, that did not work – looks like it was running out of space on the root mount, which had this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/live-rw 2.9G 2.4G 538M 82% /
Running the given commands:
$ su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm' $ yum install akmod-nvidia-304xx "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)" yum update -y
resulted in IO issues. Might have been just a faulty USB. :)
Anyway, I opted to use my laptop and set up a VNC connection instead. Here are the steps:
- Install TigerVNC
Instructions here: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/21/html/System_Administrators_Guide/ch-TigerVNC.html
root# yum install tigervnc-server root# cp /lib/systemd/system/vncserver@.service /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@.service
- Configure TigerVNC
Edit VNC server systemd config:
root# vi /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@.service
and change
- Update SELinux policy
Due to this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1062968
root# yum update selinux-policy
In my case, this updated selinux-policy to 3.13.1-105.9.fc21 and worked fine with it.
- Set up the password
liveuser$ vncpasswd
- Enable VNC port
root# iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 5901 -j ACCEPT
- Reload the configuration and start the server
root# systemctl daemon-reload root# systemctl start vncserver@:1.service
- I needed the following as I was using Fedora XFCE spin
Credits: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=272137&page=4
Edit VNC xstartup file:
liveuser$ vi ~/.vnc/xstartup
Comment out this line:
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
Add this line at the end:
/usr/bin/xfce4-session &
Restart VNC server:
root# systemctl restart vncserver@:1.service
Now you should have a running VNC server that you can access with some VNC client. I used vinagre as the laptop had Xubuntu, but any other should work. Fedora installation worked fine using this setup and was really quick.
The nicest thing – VNC session was horizontal :).