Advice on integrated video on friends system

[Nathan Kinkade]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 02:27:29PM -0700, James Earl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A good friend of mine asked me to setup FreeBSD and GNOME on his home
> computer for his family to use.  It is an old IBM Aptiva.  The usual
> stuff works, but of course it has to have integrated video: ATI Rage
> Pro Turbo chipset.
> 
> I'm running the latest Xorg in the ports tree and started with a
> configuration file using 'Xorg -configure'.  No matter what I've tried
> (no accel, no dri, defaultdepth 8, 16, Modes 800x600, 640x480), all
> the results have been the same, even when trying to run xorgcfg...
> when I run startx, my monitor blanks, and either tells me it's an
> unsupported video mode, or the screen just goes blank.  Doing
> ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't restore my text mode, but I am able to
> reboot the system using ctrl+alt+del, or I can even type 'shutdown -p
> now' (but nothing is displayed).
> 
> Could anyone suggest any additional course of action, or is this
> chipset clearly unsupported?  It's really hard for me to give up on
> this... it's not too often that I get to setup someone with FreeBSD
> and GNOME (has only happened to me once before this).
> 
> James

I don't know about Xorg and hardware compatibility for an ATI Rage Pro
chip, but from what you are describing I would tend to point to an
issue with the monitor settings rather than the video card itself.  If
the monitor is old, then EDID information may not be available from the
monitor, so Xorg may just try some default monitor setting that don't
happen to work with that monitor.  Have you done some searches for Hsync
and Vertical Refresh rates for the monitor in question?  Once you know
these values (ranges), you can set them manually in the xorg.conf file
under the section titled "Monitor".  For example:

Section "Monitor"
	<some other directives>
	HorizSync    30.0 - 70.0
	VertRefresh  50.0 - 160.0
EndSection

As far as losing control of the display, but apparently still having
control of the keyboard, is the machine on a network?  Can you possibly
ssh into the box and control it remotely?

Nathan
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