Display / Screen resolution question on IBM TP 1171

[Angel Heaven]

I've just finished installing freebsd on my IBM thinkpad i-series i-1300 1171 series IV laptop. This is a machine on which none of DSL, fedora, or ubuntu liveCD would
work at all. So I am surprised (and quite grateful) that freebsd can actually be installed on
this laptop!  

The next problem is trying to fix the screen resolution. According to winxp, it has a Trident Video Accelerator CyberBlade-Ai1 video card inside. Apparently it has 8MB or video ram, which is taken directly from the real RAM. The monitor is 1024x768. The default screen resolution of X (I tried startx, xinit, gdm) is 1280x1024, which is obviously too big for my monitor.

After searching the web and following various instructions, I've tried the following to no avail.

I found that as long as I had a xorg.conf file in /etc/X11, the mouse(trackball) wouldn't work. I tried "X -configure" and copied the file to /etc/X11. With or without changing anything in xorg.conf, the mouse(trackball) seized to work. Obviously, I couldn't do anything without a pointing device.

Then I tried xorgconfig... the problem this time seemed to be not being able to find the Trident driver. xinit, startx and gdm wouldn't load at all.

I also checked the /var/log/Xorg.0.log, it looked like the vesa driver was used by default every single time.

After reading the suggestions in this mailing list, I proceeded to running "xrandr -s 1024x768" from a terminal while running X (I tried startx and gdm). The response I got was "Size 1024x768 not found in available modes"

Then I tried "xvidtune -next" and then "xvidtune -show", viola! I got the response "1024x768 etc".  Had the screen shrunk in size?  No.  But this time I could move the mouse to the edges, and the whole screen would pan left-right and up-down so I could reach the part that was too big for the monitor. It's a virtual screen!

Well, at least it's usable now, and I'm happy. My question is that is there a way to actually shrink the screen to fit the monitor without having the virtual screen? Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-- aghv


 








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