1280x800 display, i810, 915, etc etc etc

[Ben Paley]

On Thursday 09 June 2005 23:09, Remington L wrote:
> Correction, sorry for the previously post(I'm at work). The problem lies
> with the Intel VBIOS not reporting the correct resolution to Xorg. As a
> workaround you need to modify the VBIOS and use an updated i810 driver.
> Here is the Xorg i810 driver:
> http://www.fairlite.demon.co.uk/intel.html
>  To modify the VBIOS please install and run sysutils/915resolution.
>  Thank'll fix it!

I shouldn't complain because it seems actually to be running at 1280x800 at 
last (at least, kde display manager tells me so, and Opera reports it using 
screen.availHeight and screen.availWidth!), but there are a couple of odd 
things going on...

A) I ran 915resolution before doing all the things I did to get it working, 
resetting all of the 1280x1024 modes to 1280x800. But it only works on the 
memory copy of the VBIOS, and, indeed, this morning when I rebooted, and 
still now, 915resolution -l gives three modes at 1280x1024 and none at 
1280x800... AND YET my screen is running happily at 1280x800!

B) None of my attempts to use the i810 driver came to anything. If I added 
Chipset "915G" I would get slightly different errors, but never a working 
screen (though interestingly I managed to get as far as hearing the KDE 
startup sound even when I couldn't see anything!). My current xorg.conf uses 
the generic vesa driver.

So the two things that I was concentrating on - the VBIOS and the driver, turn 
out not to have been the real issues at all. Heaven knows *what* the real 
issues were... it all just goes to show that X configuration is black magic, 
and I could just as easily have waved a chicken at it for the same result, 
and probably quicker (though not as cheap, of course).

If anyone is interested, I will be glad to send my xorg.conf, and logs and all 
the rest of it.

Thank you all very much for your help! I may be none the wiser, but I am much 
happier!

Cheers,
Ben