Compaq Pressario 700 (laptop): X totally unconfigurable

[Lorin Lund]

f.gibbs at comcast.net wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I just received FreeBSD 6.0. It installed flawlessly on a Compaq Pressario 700 Athlonbased laptop until I rebooted and saw that the viewable portion of the screen was in the upper left quarter of the screen. The resolution appears to be set alright based on the icon size in KDE (which works well), it's just the viewable portion of the desktop. As a visual: if you divided your screen now into quarters and got rid of all the right side and lower left corner, what you have left is what I see: makes viewing a mess. 
>
>The pcmcia card works fine - no connection problems, just this viewable screen issue. I tried to go into XF86config, but was spit back to the shell prompt: I can't go any further. I have installed more than five times trying to change this, but it doesn't allow me access to the config file. Other than continuing to play with installations, are there any methods you suggest I use to access the config file?
>
>Caveat: I have RTFM, docs, mans, etc...., but I haven't seen this problem documented anywhere. I am Linux convert and am familiar with much of this, however I wonder if it isn't a matter of semantics when I was searching information - I have no idea.
>
>Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
>
>/fred
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>  
>
Configuring X for notebook PCs is a puzzle.  I just installed on a 
Toshiba Satelite Pro.  The
default configuration listed the wrong driver.  Once I found out the 
right driver all I had to do
was to add the extra resolutions to the config file.  You mentioned 
Xfree86.  So it sounds
like you aren't going with Xorg.  I would think it makes little 
difference at this point.  They
are still quite similar.   I have mine set up as dual boot with Windows 
XP.  That gave me
info about the "video card" and the available resolutions.

Even after you get the video resolved you may have some work to get the 
keyboard to not
give occasional repeated keystroks (seems to be related to key-up event).