Fixing Strang FC 4 Display Glitch

Starting from the login screen, the entire display is fubar and pixes are mixed up at super low resolution 320X???... very scary because it looks like a broken display at the beginning.

typed login and password by memory and it actually logged me in. the mouse pointer is at the correct location on the LCD but the all the other contents are at super low resolution and as a result, convoluted. I managed to "feel" the location of an xterm terminal and did this:

su (be a little brave)
system-config-display --help
system-config-display --set-resolution=1024x768
system-config-display --reconfigure -v --noui
reboot

I have no idea what I was doing but that was all could try before attempting to re-install the entire system which is pretty much as bad as it could go assuming I do not have to replace the computer.

Fedora actually booted up and with an even scarier display, this time only part of the display is access able by the mouse pointer but I was able to login and the 1400-1050 display showed up except every has like 4 versions convoluted on the screen and again I had to find things through memory.

Good thing is I am able to use GUI mode of system-config-display and by selecting ATI Radeon M9 with generic LCD 1400x1050 and restart (logout/login) xserver, things seem to have come back to normal.

I have no idea what caused the glitch. I did update via yum and there is a new kernel (the third one). But I tried with all 3 of those and got the same scrambled display.

Hopefully I do not have to do this again. But I put this writeup somewhere other than my computer just in case.

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