My shop box has no users!

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Freitag 04 Februar 2011, 01:06:33, gene heskett wrote:
> On Thursday, February 03, 2011 06:34:43 pm Reinhold Rumberger did opine:
> > On Donnerstag 03 Februar 2011, 23:31:22, gene heskett wrote:
> > > On Thursday, February 03, 2011 05:07:30 pm reini did opine:
> > <snip>
> > 
> > > Now what?  This all, videowise, worked until I updated the box about a
> > > week or 10 days ago.  The end of the Xorg.0.log:
> > > 
> > > (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa
> > > (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01 at 00:00:0
> > > (EE) VESA: Kernel modesetting driver in use, refusing to load
> > 
> > <snip>
> > 
> > This is due to all that new modesetting stuff happening in the kernel.
> > 
> > You want the nomodeset option:
> > http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132
> > 
> > From what I read that option will be removed at some point in time, so
> > I'm not sure what will happen then...
> 
> In that event, all the users of emc, and there are hundreds (that we know
> of) scattered about this planet, will be screwed.

I'm sure it can be compiled out of the kernel, after all it would only be 
deadweight on most server machines. I assume there will be a different kernel 
version available in the repos for those who prefer to work without it. No 
reason to panic... ;-)

It's just that the kernel parameter will vanish, but even that will only 
happen once KMS is stable and mature enough, so I guess it will be around for 
a while yet... :-P

<snip>

> Anyway, that once again was the magic potion, fixing it up nicely, but the
> picked resolution of 1024x768 is quite a bit less than that monitors native
> resolution of about 1650x1280.

While I'm not sure what the maximum resolution supported by the vesa driver 
is, you can try it out using krandrtray in KDE or xrandr from any command 
line. It will show (& let you select) all available resolutions. (You may have 
to edit xorg.conf to persist any change here.) If no better resolution is 
displayed, you'll either have to live with 1024x768 or try manually setting 
additional resolutions in xorg.conf. See countless tutorials around the 
internet on how to do this.
Also see the Monitor section of "man xorg.conf".

> Could this be alleviated by adding an
> option  = edid in the device section of xorg.conf?

I've never seen any EDID stuff in xorg.conf, but then I haven't been doing 
much tweaking of my xorg.conf since 9.04 kept freezing my X. In fact, I 
currently don't have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

> Or even a vga=798 or
> some such on the kernel line?

That will only affect the vesafb and shouldn't do anything to X. (Luckily, as 
it would probably have screwed my X several times already if it did... :-P )

<snipping EDID>

> but I have no clue how to decode that... :(

Me neither - I don't think we should have to as long as we don't develop 
drivers...

> Or is this just the limits of the vesa driver?

man 4 vesa doesn't seem to mention any limits apart from colour depth.

> The Xorg.0.log contains
> about 50k of its looking at all available modes before picking the one it
> ends up using.  It seems like there should be a way to nudge it in the
> right direction.  OTOH, the machine is running beautifully, with instant
> response to the keyboard motion keys and can once again 'do good work'  ;-)
> 
> Thanks Reinhold.  A bunch!

You're welcome. I always enjoy helping and the research I do often comes in 
handy when I run into trouble myself.

  --Reinhold
PS: Sorry for the delay, Fridays are always rather busy for me and yesterday I 
was so tired, I just went straight to bed.