I added his tweak and got a kernel panic - "unable to sync" when it tried to mount the second partition.

In addition, neither lilo nor xrandr will accept any resolution higher than 1024x768. Looking at the documents in /usr/src/linux-4.4.38/Documentation/fb/ it appears the drivers being used are limited to that even if the hardware can support more. I'd like to know if that was intentional or merely an oversight.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

I haven't had a separate /usr/ partition in probably 15 years (haven't ever seen a need for it in my usage), so I've never had to look into this. Unfortunately, it is beyond my knowledge.

Have you tried the .conf file in your xorg.conf.d? I imagine that is the most likely to work as you're just telling X to ignore the invalid EDID and then specify your own resolutions. You might need to generate a modeline, but the instructions for that is in one of those links.

That's probably my next step. I looked into merging the root and /usr partitions, but the combination would fill 80% of the 16G partition. The two largest sub-directory trees are /usr/share and /usr/lib64. /usr/local is just a tree of empty directories right now, since SBo doesn't use it at all. The only significant package I have installed is Libre-Office 5.3. My current allocation (copied and edited from df output) is unchanged, except for the actual partition sizes, over the past 24 years:

/dev/sda1 499656 44204 418756 10% /boot
/dev/sda2 16382888 2781740 12745904 18% /
/dev/sda3 16382888 308712 15218932 2% /var
/dev/sda5 16382888 157992 15369652 2% /tmp
/dev/sda6 16382888 9259632 6268012 60% /usr
/dev/sda7 16382888 swap
/dev/sda8 1839638820 5273780 1740893704 1% /home

The only time I used a single partition was when I started with SLS, and that experience taught me to split it up so updates and re-installs wouldn't just wipe out /usr/local, /var and /home. It is a little easier now with slackpkg, but upgrading to a new release can still cause me problems.

It's probably KMS. Try with parameter nomodeset, or try this /usr/src/linux/Documentation/EDID/HOWTO.txt
I had to find the monitor specs on the Samsung site and compile the edid.bin to make mine work properly.

You might want to take a look at the short chapiter "X11 in a nutshell" on pages 7-8, which explains quick & dirty X11 configuration on Slackware-14.2:

https://www.microlinux.eu/docs/mled-14.2-guide-en.pdf

Cheers,

Niki

I have found a workaround for this problem. The root cause appears to be a chicken and egg issue due to my partitioning practices, where init tries to initialize the video drivers before the partitions with the necessary utilities are mounted. The only way I have found to fix it is to open a terminal immediately after starting X-windows, su to root and run these three commands:

# xrandr --newmode "1280x1024" 108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712 1024 1025 1028 1060 -hsync +vsync
# xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1280x1024
# xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1280x1024

Since these have to be run as root, I can't add them to my startup scripts, and I haven't figured out how to make these settings persistent. But I have put them in a shell script in the /root directory.

No, I am not about to change the partitions. Bad experiences as recent as two weeks ago continue to convince me that they must remain as they are.

I thank you all for your suggestions. I know more about X-windows now than I ever wanted to, but apparently it is still not enough.