I've been using Slackware 9.1 for a few months now,
got most everything good to go (GNOME, KDE, Quake 3, Apache, etc etc all work...)

The only problem being about 33% of my screen is going unused to this really thick black border (it's like widescreen but cut off on the sides too.)

It was like this with the console as well, but after a little reading up on the site, I tried passing in vga=795 (or something to that effect) in LILO and it worked fine (the console took up the screen).

However when gdm started up it went back to the silly little widescreen thing. Obviously none of the window managers fix it either (it's probably not fixable in that point in time).

My Dell Inspiron 4000 comes with the ATI Mobility M3 video "card", they have an updated driver for RedHat in an RPM which I don't think I can use in Slackware (perhaps I am wrong...?) but nothing that I could use.

I was thinking since it was so easy to fix in the console maybe there is something I can change in the X configuration files that will work like a miracle for X as well.

Reading through the threads though, all I see is a bunch of X config file "dumps" that aren't very helpful. I'd like to just know which file I edit and which lines I can tweak, if that's possible.

Thanks for any help!

Alekti.

P.S.: Inspiron 4000 has a 900 MHz processor and something like 128 RAM and it can't run Quake 3 for bananas. It technically "works" but with a framerate of like 0.2 fps. Any suggestions to speed it up? I tried using TWM as root to speed it up, still unplayable.

Maybe that has to do with the video drivers I'm using as well.

Well... can you tell the resolution of your screen? (what it should be in)

have you dri/drm compiled in your kernel / modules loaded?
This speeds it up...


You have to tweak your XF86Config file... I will help more if I know more info. I have a dell 500m... Not to easy to set up either... I have some experience with setting up xfree. Maybe I can help.

have been to tuxmobil?

Geert.

Well right now it's at 1024x768

In windows it goes *much* higher

But I'd be fine and dandy with ____x1024 as long as it took up the whole screen.

I've looked in the XF86Config, can't figure out what to change, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Alekti

[edit] p.s. I have not messed with my kernel at all (yet).

you could try using rpm2tgz to build a slackware package. theres no guarentee but i have successfully used this to make slack packs for my system where there was [a] no code avalible [b] compile went horribly wrong.

well... it seems that the kernel has no problems with the widescreen

Now we only need X to get it right...

try this in section "screen":

DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1400x1050" "1280x1024"
EndSubSection

You probably have this already... You only need to adjust the Modes part I guess...
restart x or reboot... If it fails add this in section "Monitor":

Modeline "1400x1050" 184 1400 1464 1656 1960 1050 1051 1054 1100 +HSync +VSync


restart x or reboot. if it fails try another post here...

next for DRM/DRI:

recompile your kernel... and compile support for your video card... Read one of the guides... recompile a couple times... eventually you'll find what options you have to compile in... (ps: try 'lsmod' if everything works on your current kernel (like sound and stuff)... so you know which modules to compile in your kernel...)

Okay, well it took both of your help to get this thing working, thanks a lot!

What I ended up doing was this:

First I used rpm2tgz to convert the ATI Mobility 3 drivers provided by ATI from RPM format to .tgz so I install them in Slackware with pkgtool (That's one thing I learned, I can use RPM's ).

After installing them and restarting X, it filled up the screen like I wanted it to, but one problem--it was acting very strange, like it had a bad horizontal refresh rate or they were bad drivers. Having faith, I started to play with my XF86Config file, nothing seemed to work.

So I extracted the .tgz with tar to see what files it modified (hack hack ;-) ) and saw that it changed XF86Config-4, not XF86Config. So I felt like a newbie and then started to play with XF86Config-4 in the same fashion, and started getting interesting results (especially when I changed the Device Driver from r128 to vesa and back again, it was vesa before the driver installation, r128 afterwards. Vesa had a good horiz. refresh rate but was boxed in, r128 filled the screen with a bad refresh rate).

Finally I decided to try someone else's XF86Config-4 file. Going to www.linux-on-laptops.com, I looked through various people's adventures and decided to download the XF86Config-4's from this website.

I downloaded the one he claimed was "his", and *amazing* it worked. So I tried to log in, and after several failed attempts and much scratching of the head, I realized his XF86Config had changed my keyboard to the German keyset. So I went back to the site and downloaded the one he claimed was "Dell's," and that worked perfectly. Right now I am running 1400x1050 and the screen is being fully used.

I am very suspicious of the "Monitor Modeline" for messing up the horizontal refresh rate. The long list of numbers didn't make much sense to me, so I didn't really mess with that too much before resorting to online resources. The horizontal and vertical refresh rates are the same now as the ones I was using before when I was tinkering, so it couldn't be that. If you think it's something else let me know please (for future reference).

Anyway, I just wanted to post this to help anyone else in the future who has any similar problems with the Slackware / Inspiron 4000, and thank you two for helping me out!

P.S. Quake changes the res. into something lower that has a bad horiz. refresh rate, I'll have to find decent Modelines for that or figure out what's causing it. Then I'll think about recompiling my kernel for a few seconds and then probably chicken out (just the sound of it is scary). Thanks though!

P. P. S. What do the number in the Modeline stand for?
Modeline "1400x1050" 108.000 1400 1448 1462 1688 1050 1050 1053 1066

well eh...

You can read it on the net... it is just a standard modeline I took from my modelines list on my pc... It is quite complicated... all the info is available.
The modelines make you control your monitor on very low... (duh, this is linux )

have fun.

Geert.