Find details of connected monitor

arizonagroovejet · 02-07-2009, 05:02 AM

Anyone know of a way to list details of the connected monitor from the command line? Something which actually probes the monitor to find out what it is rather than extracting information from some config file which may have been created through human interaction.

tredegar · 02-07-2009, 06:49 AM

Have you looked at the read-edidpackage ?

arizonagroovejet · 02-08-2009, 08:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tredegar

Have you looked at the read-edidpackage ?

I have now. Doesn't produce anything usable for my Samsung Syncmaster 206BW though.

Code:

./get-edid: get-edid version 2.0.0

        Performing real mode VBE call
        Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f00 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
        Function supported
        Call successful

        VBE version 300
        VBE string at 0x11100 "NVIDIA"

VBE/DDC service about to be called
        Report DDC capabilities

        Performing real mode VBE call
        Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
        Function supported
        Call successful

        Monitor and video card combination does not support DDC1 transfers
        Monitor and video card combination supports DDC2 transfers
        0 seconds per 128 byte EDID block transfer
        Screen is not blanked during DDC transfer

Reading next EDID block

VBE/DDC service about to be called
        Read EDID

        Performing real mode VBE call
        Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x1 cx=0x0
        Function supported
        Call failed

The EDID data should not be trusted as the VBE call failed
EDID claims 255 more blocks left
EDID blocks left is wrong.

tredegar · 02-08-2009, 09:54 AM

Try this.
Shut down X
Start it up again like this

Code:

startx -- -logverbose 6

Then open up /var/log/Xorg.0.log and search for EDID
Read from there on.
You also get the "raw EDID" as hex data in that log, which you can decode with the help of this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extende...ification_data

Somewhere windows has a program that can be used to display the meaning of the hex file and possibly edit the edid.bin data (that is easy to grab if you have an nvidia card: run nvidia-settings Then I clock GPU0 (GeForceGo
6400) then I see my monitor listed (DFP0 Default flat panel), I click that, & in the Right pane, there's a button to "Acquire EDID". Click it)

This link ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...38#post2850938 ) points to a l-o-n-g thread I was posting to in 2007. There's quite a lot of information about EDID in that thread, some of it may be helpful.

tredegar · 02-08-2009, 10:10 AM

An update:
get-edid didn't do much for me either.
but
edid.bin as grabbed by nvidia-settings can be piped to parse-edid like this:

Code:

tred@vaio:~$ cat edid.bin | parse-edid
parse-edid: parse-edid version 1.4.1
parse-edid: EDID checksum passed.

        # EDID version 1 revision 3
Section "Monitor"
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
        Identifier "Nvidia Defaul"
        VendorName "NVD"
        ModelName "Nvidia Defaul"
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fd
        HorizSync 29-49
        VertRefresh 0-61
        # Max dot clock (video bandwidth) 80 MHz
        # DPMS capabilities: Active off:yes  Suspend:yes  Standby:yes

        Mode    "1280x800"      # vfreq 60.053Hz, hfreq 48.763kHz
                DotClock        74.900000
                HTimings        1280 1476 1524 1536
                VTimings        800 805 808 812
                Flags   "-HSync" "-VSync"
        EndMode
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
        # Block type: 2:0 3:fd
EndSection
tred@vaio:~$

Maybe this helps?