Fedora 13 on Dell E6410 screen resolution problem

[Tony Molloy]

On Thursday 26 August 2010 18:12:30 Greg Woods wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 09:51 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
> > I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work.
> 
> I did finally get it installed, and it was a convoluted process :-)
> 

Following your suggestions I've also got it working at 1440x900

What I did was booted it non-graphically, did a full update so I had the 
latest kernel. Install the nVidia driver from the rpmfusion repos

yum install akmod-nvidia

ran nvidia-xconfigs to generate a new xorg.conf file.

Then it worked.

Thank You,

The laptop is gone out my door now to the lecturer who owns it. Why didn't he 
but a E6510 like the rest of us ;-)

Tony

> My first problem was that I was using what I thought was an install DVD,
> but turned out to be a live DVD. Also, these machines really are 64-bit
> machines; I was trying to install the i386 version (my understanding is
> that this should be possible but it isn't the best choice for these
> systems).
> 
> The install DVD would boot fine and run through the install process, but
> the system would not boot graphically after the install, even using
> "nomodeset". What I had to do was boot non-graphically, install the
> NVIDIA driver, modify grub.conf to specify "rdblacklist=nouveau
> nomodeset", and then finally I could boot into the graphical login
> screen and everything mostly works. At some point I managed to totally
> bork the system where many services (including syslog) failed to start.
> This was immediately after I ran all 500 or so updates, but I had been
> making other changes as well so I'm not sure what really happened. I
> ended up doing a reinstall, this time specifying the Fedora and Fedora
> Update repositories. This produced a working system with all updates
> already in place.
> 
> I say "mostly works" because I have not been able to get the screen to
> replicate on both the laptop display and the external monitor (NVIDIA
> calls this "TwinView" in one place in nvidia-settings, and "clones" in
> another). I fiddled with the nvidia-settings for quite a while and could
> never get this to work. On my previous Dell Latitude D520 laptop, it was
> possible to get the screens to replicate with the resolution of the
> laptop screen (1024x768). This problem could well be due to the fact
> that the resolution of this display is 1440x990, which may not be
> natively supported by either of the external monitors I have tried to
> use. At some point I will try reducing the laptop display resolution to
> 1024x768 and seeing if it will replicate the screens then (I probably
> wouldn't choose to use it in that mode but it would be interesting to
> know if it would work, could be useful for presentations with
> projectors).
> 
> Right now it does work with separate screens, but this mode requires me
> to be able to see the laptop display, as that is the only place that I
> can start applications (I have yet to figure out how to create a GNOME
> panel on the external monitor X screen), Once started, the window can be
> dragged over to the external monitor screen. This works, but it's
> painful to use, at least for me.
> 
> As an aside, the screens do replicate just fine under Windows 7. I
> suspect the Dell-provided W7 driver is doing some scaling for the
> external display that the nvidia Linux driver doesn't.
> 
> --Greg