Hi!

I hope someone can help me with this problem.

I am running FC3 on a Dell Dimension 8200 which has a Nvidia GeForce 3 based video card. I tried installing the Dell 2005FPW and just cannot get it to work in its native 1680x1050 mode. Seems to work with every other mode (640x480, 800x600 etc) with the viewable screen occupying the central portion of the monitor. The closest I have come is 1400x1050! I have read every posting I can find about xorg.conf and tried all the suggested ModeLine setting and still no luck.

Excerpt from my xorg.conf that at least allowed me to get 1400x1050 is as follows -

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1680x1050"
HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0
VertRefresh 60.0 - 60.0
ModeLine "1680x1050" 154.20 1680 1712 2296 2328 1050 1071 1081 1103
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 3 (generic)"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1680x1050" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

I also installed the Nvidia driver downloaded from livna (version 1.0.8178-0.lvn.1.3) to make sure it was not a problem with the nv driver. No joy there!

I tried using "system-config-display --reconfig" with the Generic LCD 1680x1050 option. Strangely the drop down list of monitor resolution settings did not show the 1680x1050 setting!

When using all the various xorg.conf settings I experimented with the following /var/log/Xorg.0.log entry was seen -

(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (width too large for virtual size)

Thinking that I could do something about this I tried the "Virtual 1680 1050" option in the Display subsection. This made no difference.

Looks like I've tried everything suggested in all the posts I've seen. Can anyone help? For example is there a surefire ModeLine setting? Or is there a problem with my BIOS, video card, something else in the xorg.conf file??? Is there an updated version of the database for system-config-display which contains the Dell 2005FPW?

Thanks.

Stephen Ng

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedo.../msg01073.html

You may want to check and see if a hwdata rpm update is available also.

Thanks for the quick response.

I checked. I already have the latest hwdata-0.146.1-1.

I tried using one of the online calculators at http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl. At my required 1680x1050 mode the calculator complained that the dot clock was higher than the maximum the monitor was capable of doing (154.19 MHz instead of 119 MHz) and recommended I use "interlace" mode. This seems strange to me. The Dell monitor is capable of displaying the 1680x1050 mode at a 60Hz refresh rate without interlace (it works on Windows).

So whats the problem? Is the X driver that bad?

Stephen

Did you visit the link???? If not, please do so.

And FYI the latest hwdata is hwdata-0.177-1.src.rpm which has entries in the change log like;


* Wed Feb 22 2006 Phil Knirsch <pknirsch@redhat.com> - 0.176-1
- More entries from Dell to MonitorsDB (#181008)

* Fri Feb 10 2006 Phil Knirsch <pknirsch@redhat.com> - 0.175-1
- Added a few more entries to MonitorsDB

A little updating and building is all that is required.

Lenard,

Thanks for your comments. I did not realise there was a new hwdata. I looked at the Redhat ftp site and found it, however, it seems to be for FC4 and FC5. Anyway, I tried installing it on my FC3 machine but found there were dependencies like kudzu, pcmciautils etc. I am very wary about installing these. They might cause me no end of trouble and I simply do not have the time to solve these. As they say - If it ain't broke, don't touch it!!

Between yesterday and now I've tried various combinations of ModeLine, Virtual, Mode settings and found that I can at best get a 1400x1050 resolution. It looks good but I'm still uanble to use the extra 280 pixels which is very frustrating after all that was why I bought the display.

I still cannot discover the root cause of my problem. Is it hardware - my video card cannot support it, or is it software - X drivers were not meant to support that resolution. In the hardware case, will I solve this with a newer video card? In the software case, is it because the FC3 versions are unable to do it? Then if I upgraded to FC4 will this help? Or is it the BIOS (I might ask Dell support about this, though they'll probably tell me that they do not support Linux!).

I really don't want to upgrade to FC4 now cause it will be a very time consuming process and I do not have the bandwidth at present.

Any other suggestions?

Regards.

Stephen Ng

Try the newer hwdata rpm from FC4 (hwdata-0.158.3-1.noarch.rpm) which should install on a FC3 updated system.

From the hwdata.spec file for hwdata-0.158.3-1;
Conflicts: Xconfigurator < 4.9.42-1, kernel-pcmcia-cs < 3.1.31-11, kudzu < 1.1.86

And from the change log section of the spec file;

* Wed Mar 30 2005 Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com> 0.155-1
- Add a boatload of BenQ, Acer, Sony, NEC, Mitsubishi, and Dell monitors

FYI: one of the boatload is your monitor.