finally bowing to pressure from those at work, i abandoned my purity and installed the closed nvidia drivers on my dell inspiron 8200. i'm running 2.6.0-test7, so i had to use the patch from minion.de, but that seemed to work okay. the problem i'm having is that now whenever load x, it's at a smaller resolution (1024x768) than it was using the vesa driver (which ran at 1600x1200). it seems to have done this of its own will, as i didn't change those sections of the /etc/x11/xf86config. it also seems logical that if it ran at 1600x1200 under vesa, it should definitely do it under nvidia. any ideas what's up? here are the relavent sections of my xf86config:

Section "Device"
Identifier "NVidia GeForce4 Go"
Driver "nvidia"
VideoRam 32768
Option "NoLogo" "1"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
HorizSync 28-50
VertRefresh 60
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "NVidia GeForce4 Go"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 1
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 4
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 15
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

1024x768 isn't even a choice here, so i'm not really sure where it's getting this res from. what am i missing?

thanks for the help...

david

ps: on the remote chance that it might be important, here are the specs dell gives for the lcd monitor:

Display

Type (active-matrix TFT)


SXGA+, UXGA, or Enhanced UXGA

Dimensions:

Height

228.1 mm (9 inches)

Width

304.1 mm (12 inches)

Diagonal

380.1 mm (15 inches)


Maximum resolutions


1400 x 1050 at 16.8 million colors (SXGA+)
1600 x 1200 at 16.8 million colors (UXGA and Enhanced UXGA)

Response time (typical)


20-ms rise (maximum) (SXGA+ and UXGA)
30-ms fall (maximum) (SXGA+ and UXGA)
9-ms rise (maximum) (Enhanced UXGA)
16-ms fall (maximum) (Enhanced UXGA)

Refresh rate

60 Hz

Operating angle

0º (closed) to 180º

Pixel pitch

0.20 x 0.20 mm (SXGA+)
0.19 x 0.19 mm (UXGA and Enhanced UXGA)

Controls

brightness can be controlled through keyboard shortcuts

Have you tried cycling through your resolutions?

Ctrl+Alt+NumpadPlus
Ctrl+Alt+NumpadMinus

actually, that's another problem, come to think of it. since this is a laptop, it has no number pad, so the c-m-+/- never worked. i assume the keyboard is just mapped wrong, i just never had any reason to change it. anyone know what the right setting is for a dell (probably any laptop keyboard, for that matter)?

(the - and + on the number line at the top of the screen don't work; they shouldn't right?)

well, the problem seems to be fixed, though i must confess that i have no idea why. what i did was substitute the following Section "Monitor" from one i found on linux-on-laptops.com for mine:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
VendorName "Dell"
ModelName "i8200 SXGA+ Display"
DisplaySize 305 230
HorizSync 28.0 - 120.0
VertRefresh 40.0 - 110.0
ModeLine "1400x1050" 110.0 1400 1400 1648 1776 1050 1050 1053 1067
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

i can't imagine the modeline did anything to help, considering the modeline is for 1400x1050, while i'm running 1600x1200. the only thing that seems substantially different from my original section is that the screen size is provided. perhaps having that convinced the nvidia driver that it was ok to obey my Section "Screen". i honestly have no idea. anyway, this particular topic is solved, though i still can't cycle through resolutions, which i guess might be nice. i'll repost that if and when it becomes a problem. thanks for your help, guys.

you do have a number pad on your laptop.... use the Fn key (it will be between yout Ctrl and "Windows" key) in combanation with semi-colon (to get numb pad +) and P (to get num pad -)

so you can use

ctrl + alt + fn + ; (semi colon) and
ctrl + alt + fn + p

to rotate through your resolutions

im not that well versed in linux my self, i just installed redhat 9 on my inspiron 8100 and also got the nvidia driver installed properly.... i had resolutions up to 1920x1440 even with the default "nv" driver.... last time i installed redhat was version 4 ages ago, & it was quite a pain getting everything up.... but this was quite easy....

i have it currently running on 1600x1200 with the nvidia driver installed.... and can configure my resolutions, card driver, monitor etc using the redhat-config-xfree86, if your using a different distribution it would probably have something corresponding to it to manage the stuff around this area....

hope this helps....
regards
oaqster