This will probably turn out to be quite a long thread but I have several questions related to the same machine and I would run the risk of repeating myself if I were to put them in separate threads. I'm trying to set up a Slackware box with full multimedia capabilities and while I've made quite some progress on this there are a few things that I have not been able to debug. First of all I'll list the relevant specs of my machine.

I have a 2.2GHz Sempron running Gnome 2.6.2 on Slackware 10.1 with a generic 2.6.10 kernel. I have two graphics card insalled, the first being a 64MB GeForce2 MX 400 AGP, the second is a 64MB ATI Radeon 7000 PCI. Both cards have identical 17" Dell monitors, model D1028LR. Both monitors were second-hand so I don't have the manuals but I found on a forum somewhere that their horizontal sync is 30-60, the vertical sync is 50-120 and I know they're at least capable of a resolution of 1280x1024. Finally, my sound-card is an on-board VIA.

So far I've gotten Xinerama running well and have no problems running both monitors as though they were one desktop; I'm using the official NVidia drivers for my AGP card so OpenGL works on that card; sound mainly works and I can watch DVD's, play music both direct from the DVD drive and from the hard-drive, and listen to the radio through the Internet with RealPlayer; I've also gotten Xine running well and can even watch DVD's full screen across both monitors (fun but impractical due to the large gap between them); I can also play Nexuiz on the GeForce monitor but there are problems with that as I'll go into below. Overall it's running pretty well and is quite stable except for a few isolated and easily fixed problems but there are some things I haven't gotten going yet.

The first problem is the resolution, although both monitors are capable of 1280x1024 I can't get them higher than 1024x768. I've tried varying the configuration of /etc/X11/xorg.conf a few different ways but with no joy. The only clue is that in /var/log/Xorg.0.log I get the line "(WW) (640x350,Dell D1028LR) mode clock 31.5MHz exceeds DDC maximum 0MHz" repeated many times with various resolutions and clock speeds. I also get the following lines:

However I have no idea what these mean and a Google search was not very enlightening. Here is the relevant sections of the current xorg.conf file for info:

Can anyone tell me what is going on here and what is the problem with this configuration?

The next problem concerns switching from X to terminal with <ALT>-<CTRL>-<Fx>, whenever I try that with Xinerama running the screen goes completely blank and won't switch to any console or even back to X. The only thing that does work in that situation is the three-fingered salute. This is not a major problem as I am quite comfortable using a terminal screen under X but it would be nice to know what causes this and what I can do about it.

The final graphics problem concerns Nexuiz. I can load up X in Xinerama mode and start Nexiuz which will go into full-screen mode on the GeForce. However when it does this the mouse, although it cannot go outside the Nexuiz window doesn't actually work. I cannot select menu items or move with the mouse when playing. When I use in window mode however it works fine, it also works fine when I disable the Radeon screen and Xinerama in xorg.conf and run X on a single screen but is there a way of configuring my set-up so that the mouse works with full-screen Nexuiz under Xinerama or is this likely to be a problem with the game itself?

The next questions concern sound. lspci reports my sound-card as follows:

I set this up by simply running "alsaconf" which found and configured without difficulty. I can now have full audio with DVD's, CD's and ogg files. However there are two problems with it. One is that Flash movies under Firefox don't usually give any sound. Sometimes it tries to and I get a brief moment of noise but usually they're totally silent. Is this likely to be a problem with the sound configuration or with Flash itself?

Also whenever I try to open gnome-volume-control I get told "Sorry, no mixer elements and/or devices found." This makes no sense as the sound works fine and the volume control sliders in xmms, gXine and RealPlayer all work fine as does alsamixer from the console so why would gnome-volume-control not work? I also can't use the volume control applet from the panel as it always stays at zero. Why would that be?

One last question, in order to be able to mount or use DVD's and CD's or adjust the sound as a normal user I have to run the commands "chmod 644 /dev/hdc; chmod 644 /dev/hdd; chmod /dev/mixer" as root. As these settings get reset at boot-time I got around it my adding these three commands to /etc/rc.d/rc.local rather than have to do it manually each time but is there a better or more appropriate way of doing this?

sorry i only had a chance to read the first couple paragraphs regarding video, and ill add my $0.02:

did you download and load/install the appropriate video card driver and reboot, successfully? did you run 'xorgconfig' and configure your video card/monitor settings EXACTLY? (*VERY* important to configure the settings for your monitor exactly as they are, not just guessing numbers for, say, the V-sync rate, etc)?

if youv done those 2 things, i dont know what the problem is for that part.

Add yourself to the groups audio, video, cdrom and disk (/etc/group). See if that clears up some of your issues.

Yes, that was done for the GeForce but not for the Radeon, I'm just using the default ati module for that. OpenGL works well on the GeForce and for a modestly-specced machine Nexuiz is quite playable. One problem though is that I wasn't able to verify the refresh rates as I could only find them on one forum and the Dell website doesn't even list the monitor on their tech support database. If anyone has the manual for this monitor I would appreciate if they could verify the figures above.


Tried that, sound now works on Flash movies - thanks. However I still get the same stupid error message from gnone-control-panel, any idea why?