Problems with agpgart--> Intel 830M video
 

I've recently acquired an ASUS M2400A notebook and I'm mostly pretty happy with it as it's way faster than my old Thinkpad 600. However, I can't get X server to work. Granted, I'm a complete newbie at this part of Linux, but while under the Thinkpad Slackware 9.1 installed no problem and X server worked right out of the box, now all I get is a black screen whenever I say startx. The monitor gradually goes from black to a lighter color, as if it were on an extremely slow dimmer switch. There is no desktop image, no KDE, no login screen, nothing. Just the slow dimmer effect. I've been afraid to run startx anymore because I don't want to fry the LCD.

I've tried compiling a new kernel, both the 2.4 and the 2.6 latest versions. I've tried compiling agpgart for this Intel chipset both right into the kernel and as modules. When it's compiled as a module I get errors on syslog that say, "i810_rng: RNG not detected; intelfb: Cannot reserve FB region; Trying to free nonexistent resource <e7800000-e787ffff>; Trying to free nonexistent resource <f0000000-f7ffffff>". When it's compiled into the kernel syslog gives the "i810_rng: RNG not detected" message only. This is true with both kernels. What am I doing wrong? As much as I like Linux, I didn't really install it to run as a UNIX box! :P I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

Did you run xfree86setup first to configure your XF86Config file. startx uses this file to configure mouse, video, etc. I had the same problem on my machine, but I was running an i845G motherboard with Slackware 8.0 which does not support 830M video. Once I upgraded to 9.1 everything was good after I configured with xfree86setup.

I also had the same problem with intelfb. It did not really do anything accept make my boot time longer. I found a thread with the answer to that problem.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/152624

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the tip. Actually my Slackware 9.1 installation CD's were hosed because they were burned on faulty media, so I had to go another route. I found some RedHat 9 CD's for sale here in China (where I'm living these days) and installed that. I had to, everything was hosed on my Slack install. I feel a little like a sell-out, but then again, it's nice to have everything working out of the box for a change... :) I might try Slack again in the future, but I just want to enjoy everything working for a while first. Plus the RedHat interface is pretty slick I must say. Still, I hate things being done for me.

I'll check out the intelfb thread you suggested. I can't seem to get my VESA settings changed though. I'm using GRUB for the first time, and though I've passed the command vga=791, it's still that annoying small screen at bootup. It doesn't matter too much since I'm booting right into runlevel 5, but it still nags me. Any ideas?