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xorg.conf—Day 32© Copyright Darrell Anderson. After my short-term hiccup with GRUB I next copied several configuration files from my primary system, careful not to overwrite anything related to the video card or monitor. Nothing stressful. I copied files to a spare hard drive, then inserted and mounted that hard drive in my second box. The only spare mouse I had was a Microsoft wheel mouse. I could use either USB or PS/2 to connect. Having never played with USB before on my old hardware, I thought I’d try that route. I was unsuccessful, probably because I don’t know the correct configuration options. So I snapped the PS/2 adapter in place and proceeded back on familiar ground. As always, some manual editing changes to xorg.conf and then my mouse wheel worked. Next I tried to adjust my video display. The first thing I noticed is the screen would blank then reappear. For no apparent reason. Just a split second blanking. Then I tried to adjust the display to 1024 x 768 because at 1280 x 1024 everything was entirely too small to view. However, at 1024 x 768 I had problems getting KDE to display fonts correctly. I did not copy my xorg.conf from my first box and I used xorgconfig to make my initial adjustments. If I can’t get the display adjusted then my second box project is out of the question. I want that second box to serve as a test area. Every time I exited KDE, either when launched from init 3 or init 4, the entire system locked up. I mean hard. I could not toggle to other console screens. I had no option but to press the reset button. Everything works just fine on my primary box. Aargh! I then tried a Knoppix 3.7 CD. During the hardware probing section I verified the video driver selected by Knoppix was the same tdfx driver I had selected manually in xorgconfig. So far so good, but then I received several screen fulls of “cloop” error messages. Then everything stopped. Cloop? What is that? I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del. Next I tried Knoppix 3.4. I have had no success getting Knoppix 3.7 to work on my first box either. From version 3.4 I received the same boot information and I actually booted into KDE. The interesting part, however, is that Knoppix seemed to take much longer to boot than what I have seen on my first box. Then I noticed that the CD drive was placed in some kind of “humming” pattern. I had never heard that kind of noise before. The noise disappeared when I terminated Knoppix. While running my X session I opened the KDE control center. The display was at 1024 x 768 @ 75 Hz. Well, I had gotten that far in Slackware. Nothing new. I then opened /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 hoping to find some magical modelines. I opened a Konsole session and mounted the Slackware root partition. I copied the Knoppix XF86Config-4. I decided I could reboot, copy and paste various sections, and hope for the best. At least Knoppix and KDE did not freeze the entire system upon exiting KDE. I then realized I did not know how to use any console text editor so I could copy and paste between configuration files. This is probably easy to do but I did not know how. I did not want to boot into KDE just so I could use Kate. So I copied my two configuration files to a floppy and to edit them in Windows. Then I realized the floppy I used was formatted in ext2. I could reboot my first box into Slackware or remain in Windows. I did not want to reboot because I wanted to maintain my Windows session. I scrounged for a DOS formatted floppy. Thank goodness for bash command histories. After editing the xorg.conf file in Windows, I copied the file back to my second box. Of course, using a DOS formatted disk meant I also had to rename the file name back to the original because copying files to a DOS disk automatically truncates file names to an 8.3 file name format. Sigh. I started KDE. The system first displayed some weird fireworks-like grid display, but successfully loaded at 1024 x 768. I edited xorg.conf and all deleted the 1280 x 1024 entries. The display did seem normal, although compared to my new LCD and 1280 x 1024 screen, the display looked awful. I am surprised at how much cleaner my LCD 1280x1024 screen compares to the CRT 1024x768. I also commented out the xorg.conf modelines for 1024x768 @ 75 Hz. I wanted the monitor to run at 70 Hz, just like I had done in NT for many years before buying my new LCD monitor. Okay, everything is fixed right? I exited KDE. Freeze. Hard. I didn’t know what to do next except head back to the web and hope I found a needle in a haystack. After some half-hearted surfing I recalled seeing some options in rc.modules for enabling AGP support. Unlike my primary box, this box uses an AGP card. I uncommented that line and started KDE. I exited. Freeze. I could exit X with a Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace and I could gracefully exit a second concurrent session of KDE. I could not exit the primary KDE session gracefully using the logout tool. After the freeze I was unable to access other console screens. After some tiring surfing I found my needle:
I don’t have this problem on my first box so I assume the difference is the AGP card. As I have no sound card in this box but hope to one day, I opted for disabling real time priority. As a friend likes to quip about many things, this stuff is not ready for prime time. Finis. |
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