Laptop resolution issue.

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Thu Nov 8 19:29:21 UTC 2012


On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 11:01:36AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Usually there is some arcane keystroke to cycle between the external
> video adapter, the internal screen, or both.

nvidia-settings no longer has support to change resolutions?

> Can you live with just the external screen working?  Then that screens
> resolution could be used without conflict.
> 
> Can you live with both displays working, but not mirrored?
> 
> Perhaps you can downgrade to an older proprietary driver.  Or even
> experiment with Nouveau.
> 
> With proprietary drivers you get what you get.  My impression is that
> bug reports / feature requests are not listened to (by nVidia or AMD).

Actually nvidia tends to respond to bug reports quite well.  My experience
is AMD doesn't.

> The conf file has been deprecated for a long time.  And for good
> reasons (it was complex and few users had any way of knowing what
> shold be in there).
> 
> Unfortunately, some installations don't work automatically.  For
> example, I have a KVM that doesn't pass information about the monitor
> to X so X gets confused (to make a complex story simple).
> 
> On one machine, X got so confused that X could not run.
> 
> X will still use a config file if you have one.  For example, I've
> built a config file to work around my KVM problem.  It is possible
> that you could do the same.
> 
> The config file is still complex so you might need help building it.
> 
> - there is a way of invoking the X server that gets it to spit out the
>   config file it synthesized.  That is a good starting point.  It
>   requires you to be able to boot to console mode, without X running
>   so you can start it up manually.  I don't even know how you do that
>   with current distros (probably easy, but different from the old
>   days with init levels).
> 
> - if you have an old system that worked, steal its xorg.conf or
>   XFree86.conf
> 
> I don't actually know what that means.
> 
> Clearly your other monitor is not connected.  The output might be more
> interesting if the other monitor were connected.
> 
> This shows that the monitor reports to X that there is only one
> resolution that it knows about.
> 
> The reporting is via EDID or DDC.  If you look through /var/log/Xorg.0.log
> you will see X's conversation with the (built-in) monitor.  The
> conversation is different for each X server device driver (nouveau,
> nvidia proprietary, radeon, amd proprietary, intel, whatever).
> 
> Looking at a system with nvidia proprietary driver, I see that its
> reporting is very modest.  It doesn't even report synthesized
> modelines -- all other drivers that I've looked at do.
> 
> This isn't connected either.
> 
> The proprietary driver is what it is.  My impression is that it
> doesn't follow all the conventions that other drivers do.
> 
> Does the Xorg.0.log file show any consideration of the setting in
> 10-monitor.conf?  For example, some hint of rejection?

Well xrandr used to not work with the nvidia driver.  I think they claim
to have fixed that, although I haven't tried yet.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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