My monitor has a 1024 X 768 pixel display at 60 hertz. The images on my screen are obviously not for a wide display as everything is stretched out. In preferences all it says is “unknown” (it's an hp2211x) and gives me no alternatives??? Can I do anything about this???

Thanks – Dick

PS I have had this thing for about a week and have figured out a lot of stuff but the above issue bugs me very much. My old linux system went by-by so I bought a new HP desk top and downloaded Fedora 13 (was working with Fedora 8).

Your monitor doesn't need drivers, your graphics card does. What kind of video card do you have in the machine?

Not knowing where I was to obtain such information, I shut my machine down and took off the side cover. There is no graphics card in there; the monitor is directly connected to the mother board.

As an aside, when I reboot the monitor, a small screen appears in the middle and bottom of the screen which is entitled "monitor status". It only stays there for a moment so I had to reboot the thing several times in order to read what it said. Essentially what it says is "current settings 1024 x 768 60 Hz" and "recommended settings 1920 x 1080 60 Hz". I have no idea as to how change anything.

Seriously need help -- Dick

That just means the graphics hardware is built into the motherboard, you still need to get appropriate drivers installed for it to fully function.

Check the output of "lspci" for anything that says "VGA Controller" or something similar. That should tell you what graphics chipset you have, and can figure out what drivers you need.

Being somewhat ignorant, I presume the output you are referring to would be the following:

00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) (
prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 2a6c
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- Fast
B2B- DisINTx
Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR-
<PERR- INTx-
Latency: 0
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 21
Region 0: Memory at fa000000 (32-bit, non-prefechable) [size=16M]
Region 1: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefechable) [size=256M]
Region 3: Memory at f9000000 (64-bit, non-prefechable) [size=16M]
Expansion ROM at fbfc0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3Hot-,D3Cold-)
Status: D0 NoSoftRst- PME-Enable- DSel=0 Dscale=0 PME-
Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Address: 0000000000000000 Data: 0000
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidiafb
00: de 10 d0 03 07 00 b0 00 a2 00 00 03 00 00 00 00
10: 00 00 00 fa 0c 00 00 e0 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 f9
20: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 3c 10 6c 2a
30: 00 00 fc fb 48 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0a 01 00 00


Sorry about that, the forum apparently stripped out all the spaces in the input which kind of makes the thing hard to read. That's life!!


Though most of this is outside my comfort zone, I presume the video chip is a "nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430]. Which I googled to find Linux drivers. Initially I found nothing but windows versions so I added "linux" to the google and got a bunch of stuff well over my head. From some of the comments I read, I get the impression that the problem is with the latest kernel upgrade???

Please, if using this wide monitor is just beyond the current fedora capabilities, just let me know. I think I can trade mine for my wife's old monitor. I am pretty sure her windows system will use the new monitor without any difficulties.

Thanks -- Dick

Uhm ... don't give up that early

Yes, "Nvidia GeForce 6150SE" is the thing you need to know.

And, nope, this monitor is not "beyond fedora capabilities". And, especially, swapping monitors will not help much, as you're stuck with a wrong graphics driver, not with an unsupported monitor.

Actually, nvidia chips are quite well supported, these days. You get an image, not a black screen, this is a new feature in linux!

But, atm, you're running an open source driver, supposedly called "nv" or "nouveau" or even "vesa".

Have a look at the files /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log (hope the path is right for Fedora) and look out for these keywords. Especially have a look at Xorg.0.log and try to find the Name/Model of your monitor. There is still a small chance that your driver is okay, but your monitor doesn't send the information needed to identify and drive it. Look out for the word "EDID".

In case there is no "xorg.conf", your graphics is expected to configure automatically. In this case, make sure, the nouveau driver is installed, from your Fedora repositories.

The driver that will work for sure is the "proprietary Nvidia driver", called "nvidia". "nvidia" is not installed by default, as it is closed source and copyright-encumbered.

I am not very firm with Fedora, so I will not give an advice on how to install the "nvidia" driver. Find a how-to or wait for a better answer here

You apparently misunderstood my problem. My new machine (an HP Pavilion Slimline) came with a “wide screen” monitor. I had no problems getting a display. The problem was that what was displayed on the screen was just stretched out. That is not so bad with text but it sure is with pictures and icons (more irritating I would say). My wife's monitor was the old standard size screen. So we have switched monitors and neither of us have any problems now (I just don't have the a wide screen monitor).

Since HP apparently does not really provide refunds for not using the windows operating system, I set the thing up to dual boot (that is what I spent the first week researching). I was afraid the Windows 7 which came with the machine would give me difficulties changing to the old monitor (every generation seems to make fixing things harder with all their automatic stuff) but both operating systems appear to be happy with the current set up (didn't have to do anything at all). And my wife's system popped right up correctly using the wide screen so she is happy too.

I will continue to watch this forum as I would like to learn how to handle problems with these new fangled stuff. I am an old man who learned to program computers long before the invention of “operating systems”. Most all of my programming was done in machine language almost sixty years ago. Back then ordinary people couldn't afford computers. Since I didn't stay active in the field I haven't stayed current with the operation codes used today. If anyone knows where I can get a list of the machine language operation codes in binary or hex, I would appreciate it as there are some programs I would like to write having to do with AI problems.

Thanks for your help -- Dick

Uhm ... I'm not sure if you understood your problem.

There is no such thing like "monitor driver" in Linux. There is a driver for your graphics adapter, driving your monitor. Actually, there are several drivers for your graphics adapter. I suppose, you're using the standard vesa driver atm. vesa can't give you a correct widescreen resolution for your widescreen monitor, as widescreen does not belong to the vesa standard resolutions.

This is similar to running a Intel Core I7 CPU with old 386 code. It will work, but you miss a lot of features.

What your monitor did, is "scaling" ... it scales a standard resolution picture to a wide screen picture. This looks, of course, ugly. Maybe it would be possible to tell your monitor to stop scaling ... but using a graphics driver that can do widescreen resolutions is the right way to go.

Okay, for now, it works for you. If you ever miss things like 3D acceleration or your PC is incredible slow when playing videos, or your CRT dies, look for a driver matching your graphics hardware.

Concerning machine code ... it depends ... AMD or Intel? 32 or 64 Bit? Usually, you use C nowadays, and only do the time critical parts in machine code, optimized for each hardware it may run on.

For Linux, the Gnu Compiler Compilation (gcc) comes with the Gnu Assembler ("gas" or "as") and extended documentation, including sourcecode. It can compile into any supported machine code, not only the one it is running on.

See the hardware manufacturers website (Intel or AMD) for a programming guide for your CPU.

Yes, you are right, we are not communicating. The problem is that I am not at all familiar with the modern terminology. What else would a graphics adapter (and its driver) drive besides a monitor.

It works means the image doesn't bug me. The only thing I use it for is browsing the internet. Trying to find people who like to think (they are relatively rare by the way). I have found a few.

It makes no difference to me; I can write for any chip if I had the current list of the actual manipulations provided by chip. I have looked at programs compiled from C and they are some of the worst designed machine language programs I have ever seen. The only reason they seem to work decently is the fact that chips are so fast today. I figured out the old Intel language from running the disassembler provided with the old windows machines but they don't provide that anymore.

You couldn't tell me where that assembler is to be found could you? Is there a disassembler available anywhere?

I poked around there for a while and found nothing.

Have fun -- Dick

The graphics driver drives the graphics adapter. Some do better, some do worse. Your driver supports the vesa standards only (at least I suppose so). Vesa is the smallest common set that all graphics adapters do understand. You need a driver for your graphics adapter that is more specialized. The driver will then talk to the display and set a usable resolution automagically.

Yes, that's right. The paradigm nowadays is "implement it fast" and not "implement it to be fast". But actually, it works. There was not much sense in optimizing your code for Pentium III CPUs. They went as fast as they came and next generation CPUs are faster, anyways. There is enough time for optimizations when this development will stop anytime in the future.

Most programs spend 90% of time in 10% of the code, anyways ... so it's effective enough to do these 10% in hand-optimized assembler. btw, writing extensive graphical user interfaces in assembler is a pain in the ass ... that's why Object Orientation has developed ...

Yes ... and no. I am not familiar with Fedora. gcc is a very basic linux standard application and is available from your Fedora package repository. Just install it. I think, "yum" is the tool used therefore in Fedora.

Please note that there is full source code available for any GNU application. And the source code will surely know about the machine code it compiles.

uhm ... I'm not sure ... "objdump" seems to do this:
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/binu...inutils_6.html

Again, a basic GNU utility and available from your Fedora repository.

Just asked google for "Intel opcodes". This is the first hit:
http://www.intel.com/design/pentiumi...als/243191.htm

Seems to be aimed at old Pentium II CPUs but there is plenty of more stuff on the Intel website.

A query for "AMD opcodes" gives similar results.

Btw, just found this one ... looks like you could feel at home there:
http://www.asmcommunity.net/

In case you just miss the good old times, just read a bit about "emulation" and "emulators". There's an emulator for nearly any old piece of hardware and it will understand "your language"

It could be because of your refresh rate. Your wide screen might not support more than 60 Hz, and that's why the images are "stretched out" (if I understand the problem correctly).

There are 2 things you could do:

1. Reduce your refresh rate via a desktop utility that came with your desktop ( Preferences -> Monitor in GNOME )

2. Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf