Hi,

I've recently installed Slackware 13.37, keeping my old 13.1 on a separate partition. When I "startx" in 13.37 the x server starts but has a garbled screen - lots of horizontal bars across the screen. I copied my /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa file from my 13.1 partition (where X works fine) but this makes no difference. Was this the correct setup file to copy across? Any other ideas for what has gone wrong?

Thanks,

X won't read the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa. That is there as a reference for users to use to create their own xorg.conf file if necessary. See if you have the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf on your 13.1 installation. If so, you can start by copying that to your new 13.37 install. It may also be helpful to look in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file for clues of what may be wrong. Lines with (WW) and (EE) will be of particular interest.

Additionally, it would be helpful when reporting problems to provide as much information as possible so others may be able to assist you. In cases like this information about the hardware you are using may be of use.

1. Did you try it without an xorg.conf?

2. Which video card do you have?

Ok, according to Windows my video card is "NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a".

Looking at the log file I found the following:

EE Failed to load module "fbdev" (module does not exist)

Is this a kernel module, or a X windows module? I thought I was using the framebuffer device since I get a higher screen resolution during the boot process (though not the penguin logo which I though came with it by default). I'm not really up to speed on how X works these days. I know you used to have to specify the video card, monitor, and modes these combinations could support in the config file. But I'm guessing now that most people probably have a framebuffer configured which does this, and then provides a standard interface to all other programs wanting to access the display, e.g. X? So what happens when X can't find the framebuffer - does it fall back to the "old" way of doing things, i.e. expecting the video card, monitor, and modes to be explicitly defined? Incidently, how does the performance of these two methods compare - is one better than the other?

I tried renaming my xorg.conf file so it wouldn't be detected. This made no difference, I still got a garbled screen when X started. I copied my xorg.conf-vesa file from my (working) slackware 13.1 partition to xorg.conf on my 13.37 configuration. X started fine and the screen was not distorted in any way! BUT, when I exited X back to the console, the console was distorted, e.g. the login prompt was stretched across nearly the entire width of the screen (and proportionally in height), and some characters didn't appear to be displayed correctly.

You can try upgrading the mesa to a newer one.

had similar problems with my nvidia card eith upgrade to the kernel, mesa, and nouveau from testing or
create a nouveau-kms.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d with the following text.
Code:

options nouveau noaccel=1

will have to disable desktop effects for kde to work with second option

Upgrading mesa, nouveau, and kernel packages from testing, and deleting any xorg.conf file seems to have fixed it.

Thanks!