Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo

[Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de>]

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Am Thu, 26 May 2011 16:28:46 -0700
schrieb "Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>:

> It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine.  I feel a
> little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
>
> A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no
> longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via
> SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs.  I was busy at the time, first
> deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go.
> 
> Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and
> the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all.  Whatever it's
> trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I
> can't even run the consoles.  The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the
> motherboard.  Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe
> support got dropped.
[...]

(I realise your decision is made, but if this is the bug I think it is, this
has nothing to do with Gentoo in particular.)

I wonder which kernel version you use, because in 2.6.36/37 I was hit by a nasty
EDID parsing bug. Actually, IIRC the code for parsing EDIDs was updated to
understand more features or something, and that triggered errors that didn't
come up before because those parts of the response from the monitor were simply
ignored until then (or something like that). This lead to my own monitor not
responding for over a minute at a time (sometimes going blank in between) and
other people complained that it left theirs permanently blank.

I think this is the original bug:
  
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31943

which contains a workaround (with patch):

  "The drm EDID checker is pretty strict about what EDIDs it will accept.  Try
   this patch and add drm.edid_strict=0 to your kernel command line."

For me, upgrading to 2.6.38 helped, I don't see the problem anymore (though
other people report otherwise).

*If* this is the bug, it makes me wonder why you don't see it under Ubuntu.

Good luck with Ubuntu!
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup

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