What to Consider when Purchasing an External Monitor

Michael Daniluk mikedaniluk at gmail.com
Sat Dec 3 11:22:22 PST 2005


        I am running FreeBSD 5.4 on a Dell inspiron 600m and am
enjoying the experience thoroughly :)  I recently purchased a Dell
Docking station and I plan to get some external devices hooked up to
it, including an external wide screen lcd monitor. I have never had a
set up like this before, and I was wondering if you guys could help me
out with a few issues...

1. I already have a monitor in mind. It is the viewsonic VA1912wb.
It's native resolution is 1440x900.... Does anyone have experience
with X Server running at this resolution? One of the reviews I read of
the monitor was from someone running linux who encountered trouble at
1440x900?

2. Is it true that certain video cards only support certain
resolutions (I imagine this is in fact true)? I looked at the site of
my video adapter's manufacturer and this info was not present, I also
did some extensive googling for this info and could not find it.
Anyone know where I can find this? I am running a Radeon 9000, and if
you happen to  know off-hand what resolutions it supports, it would be
quite cool if you can reply with that :)  ... here are the lines of my
dmesg output pertaining to my adapter:

drm0: <ATI Radeon Lf R250 Mobility 9000 M9> port 0xc000-0xc0ff mem
0xfcff0000-0xfcff
ffff,0xe8000000-0xefffffff irq 11 at device 0.0 on pci1
info: [drm] AGP at 0xe0000000 128MB
info: [drm] Initialized radeon 1.11.0 20020828 on minor 0
info: [drm] Loading R200 Microcode

3. Is there anything else I should consider in buying an external
monitor in order to avoid or at least anticipate headache? Thanks a
lot.

ps - I know a lot of this stuff isn't totally pertinent to FreeBSD. I apologize.


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