Advice on integrated video on friends system

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Tue Mar 15 21:16:19 PST 2005


James,

  The ATI Rage Pro is a little different than a modern video chipset.
It was designed before PnP monitors, so what they did is there is a
DOS utility that you run under DOS and write the monitor settings
(ie: the maximum refresh rates and such) into eeprom in the video
chip.  When the video drivers query the video chip for the modes the
monitor supports, they get these values, not the real modes the
monitor supports.

  The chip was probably setup at the factory to whatever the old IBM
monitor could be driven to, and that monitor is now long gone, of
course.

  Also one other thing - while the svga server supposedly has support
for the ATI cards, I've found with the older ATI cards that you must
select the ati server.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of James Earl
> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:43 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Advice on integrated video on friends system
>
>
> I've included HorizSync, and VertRefresh for the monitor's specs.  Is
> there more that's needed in this case?  The monitor that I'm currently
> testing with is a Samsung 193P.  I also tested on a Samsung 171S, and
> an old CRT.
>
>
> On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:35:51 -0600, Henry Miller
> <hmiller at intradyn.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'd start by getting the specs for the monitor and manually entering
> > them into the xorg.conf file.  This looks to me like the case of the
> > monitor shutting itself down because the sync is out of the supported
> > range.
> >
> > man xorg.conf
> > man Xservers
> >
> >
> > On 3/15/2005 at 14:27 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
> > >_______________________________________________
> > >freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> > >http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
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> > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >
> >
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