[GTALUG] Xrandr problem

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Peter King <peter.king at utoronto.ca>

| I have made a bit of progress on the problem -- but only a bit.
| 
| (1) The keymap seems to be part of the problem: all the modifier keys are,
|     as far as I can tell, dead.  That's why keyboard-oriented tiling WMs
|     are more or less stuck (goomwwm, cwm, dwm, etc.)

Modifier keys dead?  I assume you mean shift, alt, ctrl.

That's pretty odd.  It doesn't sound like something to do with lack of
hardware support -- those are pretty standardized.

| (2) However, twm works as well as it ever did.
| 
| (3) I followed the gentoo guide to setting up kernel modesetting using the
|     intel graphics driver, and it made things appreciably worse: when the
|     kernel boots and the graphical framebuffer is supposed to take over,
|     the screen simply goes black.  I can ssh in, though, and see that
|     according to dmesg the inteldrmfb has successfully loaded, so what
|     gives?

Sometimes there is a proprietary thingee that gates the display.  For
example, I've had notebooks that had no backlight until something was,
for lack of a more accurate word, turned on.  Can you see a faint
image?

| (4) I also got no joy whatsoever at blind-typing into the console to start
|     X, which, again, I could see by ssh was supposedly running but only
|     gave a blank screen.

SSH from another machine should let you do a lot.

You can look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

You can actually run xrandr, for example, by setting DISPLAY:
	DISPLAY=:0 xrandr
That probably assumes that you are logged in on X or the ownership
will be wrong.

Perhaps you can log in via blind typing.

| All this on the internal 1680x1050 laptop screen.  So while it was blank,
| I thought, why not, and plugged in an external VGA monitor.  Voila!  The
| console came up on the external and the internal screens.  Better yet, so
| did X with twm.  It seems to respond to xrandr, too.

Did the modifier keys work?

See if /var/log/Xorg.0.log or dmesg or something are different in the
two cases.

| This is all on a Lenovo 3000 n100 0768 model, which I recall was finicky
| the last time I set it up (back in 2006 or so).

Google?  I'm sure you've done that a lot.

Try some live distros for variety?

|  But I don't recall dead
| keymaps, and, while I had to use the i915resolution hack back then, that
| should all have been superseded by kernel modesetting...

Ask it to use VGA instead of intel?