<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> On 12/8/2012 5:15 PM, Jonathan Marsden wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:50C3BBFE.5010004@fastmail.fm" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On 12/08/2012 01:17 PM, John Hupp wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Can I force usage of a certain driver? I read that this was supported with xorg.conf, but that does not exist by default now, and I think Xorg uses an automated configuration system called KMS, about which I know next to nothing. But perhaps a configuration via xorg.conf is still respected/supported? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Yes, it should be. Also you can (in conventional desktop Linux, and so I assume also in LTSP) pass parameters to the kernel that will affect which video driver is used. You might, for example find that adding something like video=fbdev to the client kernel boot options would cause it to use a generic framebuffer based graphics driver that could work where using all the capabilities of a card/chip-specific driver is failing. I don't know how to tell LTSP to pass custom parameters to the client kernel, but it should be doable in a configuration file somewhere. One further comment: some of the cards/chips you list seem very old indeed (mid to late 1990s?), and some seem to me to be relatively uncommon. If it is practical for you to buy and install some older AGP or PCI graphics cards on the (desktop) LTSP client machines you have, spending $20 per machine (new items, on ebay, for example nVidia MX440 AGP cards, or Radeon 7000 or X600 or 9250 cards) might be worth exploring, compared to spending hours debugging graphics drivers for the each of the many different cards/chipsets you currently have available. In a sense this is "giving up" on a free "just fix the software" solution, but if your time has value, it should perhaps be considered. Jonathan </pre> </blockquote> Thanks for all that. And a good point about buying some cheap supported cards. I did that very thing when I saw that I wanted to learn how to use LTSP, so I laid in a small stock of PXE-boot-capable network cards. But as I got started with this stalled boot problem, I didn't know WHAT was going on. When I started suspecting video driver support within the past couple days, I just pulled every PCI or AGP card I could find here to test with. After the smoke clears, I'll look for a practical solution. But at the moment, I feel like I'm still trying to understand what's going on. </body> </html>