Thread: widescreen woes
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Old 24th June 2008
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jbhappy jbhappy is offline
Real Name: Jeff
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Default widescreen woes

(re-posted from bsdforum.org in case the smart people don't read there any more.)

Howdy,

I have at my disposal an NVidia Quadro(?) NVS 210S (onboard video, Dell system) and an ATI Radeon 9250 (PCI card). I'm running FreeBSD-amd64, and I'm not at all interested in i386, so I guess the NV binary drivers are right out. I'm running X.org 7.3, compiled from source (ports), cvsup about a week ago.

What I want most is to do 1680x1050, my new 22" widescreen monitor's optimal resolution. The ATI does this with no tweaking at all, except that with the card installed, the console tends to freeze when I exit from X or else the Xorg process starts consuming 100% of one CPU core when I start X (and then the console freezes when I try to exit the X server), so that's no good. The NV won't do anything more than 1280x1024 over DVI. It'll do better than that via VGA, but none of those are widescreen modes. When I tell it to use 1680x1050, the Xorg.0.log entry is "exceeds panel dimensions". Another entry states that the panel size is detected as 1280x1024.

I don't care about acceleration especially--I just want the extra screen real estate (and to use the monitor I just shelled out for, of course). I don't even have 2D acceleration right now with the X.org 'nv' driver, do I?

Is there anything I can do to tell X that my monitor really can do 1680x1050? My xorg.conf is below. Xorg.0.log is apparently too large to post here, so it's at http://www.tc.mtu.edu/~jfb/Xorg.0.log .

If I'm out of luck with respect to NVidia, do I have any options with the ATI Radeon 9250? Is anyone else running one of those with no lockups? My card is an ATI-branded PCI (not PCIE) card. Someone on freebsd-stable suggested that was probably to do with X.org's interaction with the card/chipset rather than being a FreeBSD problem, but if anyone's seen this problem and gotten around it, I'd be interested to know how.

Failing everything else, I guess I can pick up a new card, but I always like to take a crack at making what I have work before I do that. I'm all ears for recommendations, though. I do have a PCIE slot available, so that's not out of the question. I just want something that'll let me do 1680x1050 under FreeBSD-amd64.

thanks for any input,
Jeff

Code:
# xorg.conf
Section "Module"
    Load        "dbe"   # Double buffer extension
    SubSection  "extmod"
      Option    "omit xfree86-dga"   # don't initialise the DGA extension
    EndSubSection
    Load        "freetype"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
    FontPath   "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/local/"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Keyboard1"
    Driver      "kbd"
    Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"
    Option "XkbRules"   "xorg"
    Option "XkbModel"   "pc104"
    Option "XkbLayout"  "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Mouse1"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option "Protocol"    "Auto" # Auto detect
    Option "Device"      "/dev/sysmouse"
    Option "ZAxisMapping"   "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "My Monitor"
    HorizSync   30 - 83
    VertRefresh 56-76
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Standard VGA"
    VendorName  "Unknown"
    BoardName   "Unknown"
    Driver     "vga"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "NVIDIA generic"
    Driver      "nv"
    #VideoRam    131072
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Screen 1"
    Device      "NVIDIA generic"
    Monitor     "My Monitor"
    DefaultDepth 24
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       "1680x1050"
        ViewPort    0 0
    EndSubsection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier  "Simple Layout"
    Screen "Screen 1"
    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Last edited by jbhappy; 24th June 2008 at 09:03 PM. Reason: typo, missed a word
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