Giving up on Linux...

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Feb 23 03:14:50 UTC 2004


On Feb 22, 2004, Jos Vos <jos at xos.nl> wrote:

> Yes...  I'm talking about 1400x1050 laptops (e.g. the ASUS M3700N,
> there is an Acer model with the same issue and maybe there are more)
> with an Intel graphics chipset that only work in Linux on 1024x768,
> because "the Linux driver only supports BIOS-modes" (IIRC

BIOS modes?  This sounds like the VESA driver, and this means the VBE
tables are missing some of the resolutions the graphics card supports.
It's a BIOS bug, that ideally the laptop vendor should support, even
if by demanding the graphics card vendor to improve their VBE code.
Unfortunately, laptop vendors generally don't care about the VBE code,
since they generally care only support OSs that don't use them anyway.

> I now bought one with ATI Radeon which is reported to work (although
> currently - pre-4.4.0 - only with a binary ATI driver).

Eeek.  Binary drivers suck.  I'd rather use VESA any time.  After
having made the mistake of paying Dell for a 1600x1200 screen that
their VESA VBE tables didn't support, I don't plan on making this
mistake again.  Either the video card is supported natively by X, or I
go for a lower-resolution screen that has VESA support.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer





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