Dell Inspiron need help is xfree the answer 800 600 screen
 

Hi All
Just installed Suse 10.1 after a hard drive failure so Mr Gates is no more. Dell Inspiron 1100 with a Pentium4 2.4.
40 gb drive 512 ram. When i got up and running i only had a 800 600 display. I am told that i need to install Xfree86. Being new to all this and being spoilt by windows just being able to click and a program is set up. All this terinal code etc has me lost. I installed Suse 10 on 2 Demensions with no problem. So it seems that the laptop is differant. How do i just click and all is good.

Thanks

Give someone a smile it costs nothing.

Upgrade your BIOS to the latest available (A32 ???).
Several of the Dells have an issue with the way they assign video memory - I think the BIOS flash fixed it for me on an 1100. Several distros work o.k., although I haven't (and won't) tried Suse.

Hi

check this page out "linux-on-laptops"
you will find Dell as Vendor and your system as well.

Important is that you check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file
and there the Sections "Monitor" "Display" "Device" "Screen"

If you still need assistance you can post again of course.
regards

Hi

I am trying to get the display setup on my Inspiron Laptop. A reply has left the advice below, how do i find this on my system???

Important is that you check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file
and there the Sections "Monitor" "Display" "Device" "Screen"

If i find the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file what do i do with it???

Thanks

Give someone a smile
:newbie:

Hi infact that I am now able to post messages including Hyperlinks
here is a pre-configured XF86Config from a Redhat 9 System.
But never the less if its Suse or Redhat or if its xorg.conf or XF86Config
the entries are always similar.
**** http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/Chri...ips/XF86Config ****
Without a BIOS Update in order to install you will to append vga=711 as boot parameter. Dell BIOS only pre-allocates 892 KB (which forces the smaller screen)
(w/o an Update...) So 1st you will have to get the patch (http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/845patch.tar.gz). Extract, build and then copy the 845patch executable to some place; edit the startup files to make sure 845patch 32768 is executed before Xserver starts (if you dont know the details of each step, follow the link to Damien's site given above). Here 32768 refers to amount of videomemory that you think your laptop can handle. The specs of my Inspiron 1100 said that with 128 MB of RAM, upto 32 MB of video memory can be assigned and with 256 MB or more, upto 64 MB can be assigned)

Here is the link to the Dell Section of Linux-On-Laptops
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html

regards

I was having a similar problem even after installing ati drivers i had crappy resolution.

My Fix: I went into monitors and changed it from the one it picked to generic 1280x1024. Aparently the monitor it picked by default had a max resolution of 800x600.

Before you go through updating your bios and everything try that.

nomb

yeah nice..... or just use a Live Distri like Knoppix or just stay in runlevel 3 :-) lol

...and this is suppose to do what exactly?

Sorry I just wanted to help and
I bet that Knoppix works out of the box with this System. And the other thing I had such a Notebook an I works fine and clear with the suggestion I've made. *nomb*
So the way you told works of course but the truth is that this is only a workaround.

I don't want to make a big deal out of that. But I don't like performance problems.
And yes it's not so easy to prepare the system as I suggested.

Post it, people can advise you what needs changing, you won't need the mouse/input sections, or all the heavy commenting an xorg file has. The easiest way for you to copy and paste may be to open it in a text editor like gedit/kate and copy/paste, yo ucan do it from the terminal by high lighting then pasting with middle mouse to.

Basically (i have found this the most common solution to this problem) it is going to result in specifying a higher res for it to use, and hopefully *fingers crossed* that is all that's required.

I was speaking of my own experience as well which was not a workaround. I installed the ati drivers and everything I needed for my video. But when you install them they don't touch your monitor settings. So I had perfectly working drivers, 3d acceleration and everything but could not get my resolution any better because the monitor FC5 choose by default had a max resolution of 800x600. Weather I flashed my bios or not isn't gonna change which monitor FC5 has selected for me which is why I went in and selected the correct one. After that everything worked great. I'm not saying your way didn't fix your laptop. All I'm saying is before you do complicated things: flashing you bios, recompile you kernel, anything like that, why not try the simple things first.'
And on another note there is no need for sarcasim when people are just trying to help. Everyone here knows that not everything suggestion is going to help solve the problem, but everyone also knows that the more suggestios that are made the better chances that one of them will work.

nomb

@nomb your are right. Sorry. I Hope that I didn't stepped you or anybody on the foot.
so only configure the xorg file or use system-config-display. Cause how can a resolution of 1024x768 be driven by a Display that is only setup to show 800x600.
;-)

But at the end I hope peterfc has now a good scaled display...

With everything we've given him he should have a monitor capable of virtual reality :D

nomb