I have a weird interaction between Linux and Windows with the HDMI output from my Dell Studio XPS 1645 and a Dell S2409W monitor.

Whenever I reboot from Windows back over into Linux, the Input Color Format on the monitor has changed from RGB to YPbPr, and thus the colors are a pink'n'green mess. I can manually change the mode back to RGB but whenever the monitor goes to sleep it will come back as YPbPr!

The only way I can fix it is to unplug the power cord and hold the power button for 5 seconds to reset the monitor -- after plugging the power cord back in then the color format will be correct again (RGB.) Or rebooting back over into Windows the color format is correct.

This never happens rebooting from Linux to Linux, Linux to Windows or Windows to Windows -- only from Windows to Linux.

This is on Fedora 12 but I don't know that the version particularly matters -- I've only ever used Fedora 12 on this new hardware so I can't say that it does or doesn't work with anything else.

Anybody have any idea why the Input Color Format gets changed like this?

Thanks!

Might be how the shutdown clears the system if at all. Try telinit 3 and then shutdown.


There has been problems with computers for decades with reboots and cold boots. A reboot tends to be a warm boot and may not reset all gates or lose all energy stored.

Good news is you know how to do a cold boot.

Thanks for the suggestion of shutting all the way down.

I shut down from Windows last night and booted into Linux this morning. The same problem still exists.

A little more info...

I tested with another, identical monitor and got the same result so it's not a fluke with a single monitor, but could be some interaction with this particular model.

An interesting thing I noticed is that the monitor input is fine when the GRUB OS selection screen comes up, but once the Fedora login screen displays the input has been changed to YPbPr. I'm using KDE if that helps...

Try hooking the monitor to a system that does not use ATI graphic cards. If it does not have the problem, update the ATI driver or use the latest open source ATI drivers from freedesktop.org. If it still has the problem, change the cable. If new cable does not fix the issue start complaining to both ATI and freedesktop.org.

I don't have another machine in the house that has an HDMI-out port on it and this laptop doesn't have a DVI port.

I tried the Radeon driver from AMD but it turns out they still haven't updated it to work with the new version of X.org that Fedora 12 is using.

So I bought an HDMI -> DVI adapter and tried the DVI port on the monitor instead of the HDMI port.

Works like a charm.

So it would appear that these particular Dell monitors don't play nicely with HDMI and Linux. I'm going to write it off to that.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.