I have an old laptop, Dell Inspiron 4100, and while its battery is busted, it still works with AC power plugged in. It’s not fast with Pentium Mobile processor with 384MB RAM.

Anyhow, I wanted to install the Fedora 11 as a toy box at work. I used Live CD i686  to install it, but for some reason, the display was really messed up. There were black vertical lines, and modifying xorg.conf and display settings wouldn’t do anything. At some times, the display was totally off the screen, and sometimes there were four screens in the monitor.

After searching for a while, I saw a posting that recommended disabling Kernel Most Setting (KMS) by adding “nomodeset” in /boot/grub/grub.conf. I tried it and it worked perfectly…  You can read more about KMS here.