[SOLVED] Bad screen resolution when switch from NVIDIA graphics card to motherboard graphics

crs17 · 11-09-2012, 08:15 AM

I have a desktop computer that I bought to do CUDA development (ie programming on NVIDIA graphics cards). There is a cuda-capable NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS card installed. Up until now, the 8400 has been driving the monitor also. But to run cuda-gdb, the card must not be doing anything else.

So I went into BIOS and told the BIOS to use the onboard graphics processing. I don't know anything about that processing but according to lshw, the computer is a Compaq Presario 061 and the motherboard is an Amberine M from ASUS. I moved the terminal plug to the correct socket on the computer tower and rebooted (Ubuntu 12.04). The splash screen with the fancy "ubuntu" and the travelling dots looked fine but when the login screen and then the gnome desktop (yes, I refuse to use Unity!) came up I could only see a portion of both the login screen and the desktop and everything was too big. It functions and in theory I could actually use this system and scroll to see the rest of the desktop, but I'm not willing to give up all my screen area.

When I issue xrandr to see the available the available resolutions, I see:

Quote:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 720 x 400, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-0 connected 720x400+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 337mm x 270mm
640x480 60.0 59.9
720x405 70.0
720x400 70.1*

This looks discouraging. Am I out of luck or can I get the onboard graphics to drive my monitor at a suitable resolution?

Thanks,

Craig

business_kid · 11-09-2012, 01:59 PM

First of all (In console mode - it's easier on the eyes) run
lspci and see what the installed video is. If it makes no sense, run lspci -vn, and look up the pci.id, which you can google.

Next, uninstall the nvidia driver. You can use --uninstall on the .run file or /uninstall. If it's a distro package, use that. It overwrites Mesa libs, and other stuff.
Install a driver for your onboard graphics system, and try from there. X comes up in 640x480 @ 31.5khz if it can't make sense of anything, because everything boots at that frequency.

Have a look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see what else it might be bellyaching about

crs17 · 11-09-2012, 08:29 PM

I spent a while with this message but I'm still stumped. I have a number of problems - both things I don't know and problems I'm anticipating with your solution.

Under lspci I see "02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS] (rev a2)" which seems correct. From lspci -vn, 02:00.0 is using kernel driver: nvidia and kernel modules: nvidia_current, nvidia, nouveau, nvidiafb.

You talk about removing drivers but I'm not sure how to do that. Is it blacklisting? Nouveau and nvidiafb are already blacklisted. I don't know how to use --uninstall on the .run file (what .run file?) "If it's a distro package?" mean nothing to me. I'm using a pretty standard ubuntu. What is "a distro package"? and what might or might not be one.

And last but not least, how do I figure out what the driver is for my onboard graphics?

Thanks for all your help so far!!!!

Craig

business_kid · 11-10-2012, 03:44 AM

Standard Ubuntu - uninstall the driver with apt-something (No ubuntu experience to draw on)

Best to post the output of

Quote:

sudo lspci

in code tags and we'll have a look

crs17 · 11-10-2012, 12:26 PM

Here's lspci:

Code:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI-X Root Port
00:12.0 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 Serial ATA Controller
00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 11)
00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS] (rev a2)
02:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
03:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev 80)
03:08.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2760 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R
03:09.0 Modem: Motorola SM56 Data Fax Modem (rev 04)

I don't see anything interesting other than the line 02:00.0 which I reported earlier.

When I run synaptic to look at installed packages and filter on "NVIDIA", I see the following packages installed: jockey-common, jockey-gtk, nvidia-common, nvidia-current, nvidia-setting, ocelot

business_kid · 11-10-2012, 12:47 PM

Quote:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series]

That seems to be your onboard video. Radeon GPU in the Northbridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon...or_generations

From the number (X200) it's feeble crap, but the thing runs on the OSS driver and will do fine as long as you're not expecting loads from it. You need xf86-video-ati or some such package, and you need to remove the nvidia one. I have the RS690 here and with the latest drivers movies are playable at full speed on 2 full screens and you could lip read.

crs17 · 11-14-2012, 06:25 AM

Sorry it took so long, but that didn't work.

The vagueness of the instructions scared me a bit, but I finally tried. When I used synaptic and filtered on xf86-video-ati I was shown xserver-xorg-video-(radeon/ati/mach64/r128), all four of which were already installed. I don't think I can really remove the nvidia drivers since I imagine I need them to run CUDA (the devel environment for code running on the NVIDIA chip). Even so, as an experiment I followed your instructions and uninstalled nvidia-common and nvidia-settings, which are the only nvidia drivers that were installed.

Still had the same large screen.

BTW, as to the video controller being feeble - that's ok. All I want to do is run X and maybe static webpages. I'm not interested in video. It's just a development machine.

Thanks for your reply and again, sorry I sat on this so long.

business_kid · 11-14-2012, 01:23 PM

Right. With the nvidia driver install, you overwrite files in /usr/lib64. Try this

ls -l /usr/lib64/libGL*

Here's mine on libGL.so

Code:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     10 Oct  1 20:47 /usr/lib64/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     12 Oct  1 20:47 /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.1.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 547424 Jul 10 20:20 /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1.2

With nvidia binary blob installed, libGL.so.1 will point at the nvidia libGL.so.xxxxx whereas you need the native mesa libs there for OSS radeon. There's 3 libs overwritten. Can you use nouveau for your programming?

Depending on your requirements for programming, I would draft a video.conf for /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/video.conf and list the 2 cards and their respective monitors.

Section "Device"
<Radeon Card details>
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
<Radeon monitor details>
EndSection

and repeat for the nvidia card - look at a sample xorg.conf for details. Look at 'man xorg.conf' and you'll see you can specify PreferredMode, Virtual (screen size) and most important drivers for the video cards. If that doesn't sort it, get it misbehaving and pastebin the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log and post the link and we'll see what's happening. It sounds like you have a low resolution and a high Virtual screen, so you're only seeing a tiny bit of it.

crs17 · 11-15-2012, 07:06 AM

I've sort of given up and tried a new solution. I went down to the MicroCenter store here and spoke to someone in their build your own computer department. He seemed to know the solution quickly. He said the old motherboard that I had was "only the onboard or a card." So once I put in the Nvidia card, the onboard graphics was unreachable.

So I ended up with a sort of expensive solution. He sold me a PCI graphics card (I can't use a PCI-E card since my motherboard has only one PCI-E slot which holds the cuda card). Now one of my linux systems (ie disk partitions) works, the one on sda1. I haven't yet tested the cuda stuff because of a separate problem with loading the runtime libraries. When I solve that I'll see.

The other linux partitions on that computer don't seem to work. I'll have to figure out what drivers they are missing.

But thanks for all your help.

Craig

business_kid · 11-15-2012, 09:06 AM

That's fine. Mark this solved, as you have a solution. Some other dweeb could be searching these forums in desparation. They also show on google.