I was so excited to get Fedora 11 installed on my new laptop. I had the x64 Live CD and x64 DVD all burned -- ready to go. First, test with Live CD, then install with DVD (to get a custom install and all). Well, booting to the Live CD was where things started to go wrong.
I got the cool Plymouth boot screen, the little Fedora free speech bubble filled in and made that cute little "poof" explosion. Then, my screen went nuts -- splintering into two with boot text. The CD ceased to spin and the machine just hung there with a split-screen and a functional cursor. What? Maybe the Live CD is bad?
I boot from the DVD and after booting to the point where Anaconda detects the video card, same damn thing. So, I reboot on the DVD and choose to go with the "safe" video. Oh, it works now. It boots, the resolution is off (1024x768 instead of 1280x800) but I can install at least. After minutes of copying files and installing, I boot the system to find that my display resolution is still 1024x768. Grr.
Giving the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file a quick edit and swapping out "vesa" for the display Driver for "radeon" made a whole lot of difference (see Update 2 for better information). On reboot, my display worked and resolution was fine. I don't get the cool Plymouth boot screen -- and my guess is because I am not using the kernel mode-setting video stuff, but that is OK. Desktop Effects seem to work fine, so I am OK.
Actually, that is all that went wrong. Otherwise, things seem to be working fine. I have the x64 version installed, so I just wanted to note for myself how to get Flash x64 working. Download from here. Then untar/ungip and put the resulting .so file into: