I'm having trouble getting X to display correctly on a Dell Latitude LM 133Mhz lappy.

The first problem is this odd colored shadow to the right of everything on the screen. Actually, this may not be a linux issue... as the system's bios menu shows up funny like that, too.

The second problem is opening windows and using the application menu in Window Maker. I can close or move a window, and the image will stay there, till the screen is all garbled up.

And finally, the whole system hangs when i shut down X and i have to power down. The screen goes black and then nothing.

This is my first laptop or LCD display so i'm sorta clueless as to how to configure it. I've searched for technical information on that type of screen but i havent gotten far. Any help would be appreciated.

I had Slack running on a similar laptop without any problems.
(KDE2 was slow...but usable...but I switched to iceWM).

Have you checked your logs? I find that its a good place to start when you have unexplained freezes.

Does the laptop boot up/shutdown ok in console mode?

Yeah, it boots and shuts down flawlessly in console.

As for the logs, it'll be hard to get to them now as I got pissed and reformatted the 2.1GB hd and decided to start over, perhaps from LFS.

I'm debating if i will attempt to install X on it, considering how poorly the screen looked and the nearly useless laptop pointing system.

Right now, i'm using tomsrtbt to get around on it... but the odd color shadowing remains (when colors are displayed) Colored text on a black background looks fine... but any colored backgrounds exhibit the shadowing. It's really begining to concern me as possible hardware damage. Maybe the LCD is damaged in some way?

It's mearly just a project for me... I like the idea of being able to recycle old hardware with linux (the laptop was over $3000 new but didnt cost me a dime initially). But if it's gonna cost any more money to fix the screen, i wont bother. I'll part it out on ebay or something.

My main concern right now is diagnosing this screen issue. Any ideas?

I connected it to a CRT today and watched it boot up. The LCD is more screwed-up than i thought... What is supposed to be a blue on white bios menu screen looks grey on pink from the LCD... with this dark colored shadow to the right of all the menus.

So now i'm depressed. Somebody please tell me i can just crack open the laptop and tighten something that is loose....

I WISH I could tell you that. But last time I cracked open a laptop, we fried it beyond repair. Had to buy a new one.

It still works ok, if I plug it in to a monitor....but still...

sounds like you lost all blue coloring in your lcd. Not sure what you can do with it or what could be the acutal problem. In a crt it would be an adjustment to the blue input but not sure how lcd's handle it. Could be in the screen or on the video card. You could always look online for a replacement screen.

Well, i've made up my mind to replace the LCD... there doesnt appear to be any for the Dell Latitude LM on ebay but there are quite a few for the Inspiron and Latitude CPi.

So, i'm wondering how interchangable laptop LCD's are between models. All the propriatary hardware between different laptop models can be really frustrating. Anyone have any experience with this?

Well my experience was that LCD's aren't particularily interchangeable.

My SO's E-machines laptop (yeah, I know) couldn't be repaired because the shop could not find any LCDs for that model and even if he did the price to fix was around 500$.

We just ended up buying a better laptop for the same price (used of course).

YMMV

propriatary hardware sucks. Why can't they standardize these things?

I wonder if i can just use a screen and inverter from another laptop.