On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 06:54:09PM +0100, Andy Green wrote:
On Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:44, akonstam@trinity.edu wrote:
As I keep telling my students you need to ask even it shows your ignorance. Maybe it is the early hour but I don't know how to try the 'vesa' X driver or even what the 'vesa' X driver is. I would like to know what it is if it potentially will solve our problem. Could you clarify?
Yep. X is the graphical display system, it keeps its configuration in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
If you make a backup of that, then have a look in there, you'll see it is made up of various stanzas which talk about your keyboard, mouse, monitor, display adapter and "screens", which are the association of these other things into a single monitor.
You want to look for this:
Section "Device" ... Driver "mydriver" ... EndSection
mydriver is the name of your current X video driver. Comment out the old Driver line with a #
# Driver "mydriver"
and add in the vesa driver instead
Driver "vesa"underneath it. Then save the file and restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will do it if you saved your stuff and are on VT7 (Ctrl-Alt-F7)).
Now you should come up reasonably as before, but you are using a very boring, 'safe' driver with no real accelleration. If the behaviours that you don't like persist, now you can rule out the X display driver as the source. But perhaps the behaviours will be gone, in which case you know it is likely coming from your old X display driver, whatever that was.
-Andy
I could try this but the same behavior occurs on machines that have a wide variety of drivers being used (nvidea, intel, etc). For example my machine has a ATI Technologies Inc. R128 video card and uses the r128 driver. It is hard to believe all these drivers have the same bug.