Re: [gentoo-amd64] video driver / system state question

[Drake Donahue <donahue95@comcast.net>]

On Mon, 2010-01-25 at 16:09 -0800, Bob Sanders wrote:
> Mark Knecht, mused, then expounded:
> > far no luck but I'm learning so it's interesting.
> > 
> >    My quick question goes like this - if I boot with no drivers I get
> > a VGA console. If I modprobe a frame buffer driver at boot time then I
> > get a nice looking but slow frame buffer console. All good so far.
> > However my graphics adapter is supposed to use the i915 driver and
> > when I modprobe that - either in auto-load or at the command like
> > after logging in - my screen goes 'black'. I'm wondering what I do -
> > other than look at what's in dmesg - to figure out what state the
> > machine is in. Is the screen turned off? Is the driver running and
> > putting out 'black'?
> >
> 
> The "black" is the monitor being driven beyond it's spec in either
> vertical or horitizontal or both.
> 
> For it to work, you'll need a proper mode line that can be stolen from
> some other Linux system  via a google search or by downloading puppy
> linux and using that to work out what X is doing.
> 
> With X and gfx, /var/log/Xorg.0.log is your friend.  Especially when
> used with a google search on the error message.
> 
> Bob 
> -  
> 
> 
have you emerged a window manager/desktop? twm and xterm are no longer
provided with the server.