Mandrake 10.1 Screen Resolution Problem

[alexhm]

I have a home-built PC with a triple boot system, Widows XP, Suse Prof 9.2 and Mandrake 10.1. Intel 845G/GL chipset, with 82845G/GL screen card and Yüsmart 178MP-A TFT screen. Somehow I managed to screw up the screen settings for Mandrake and now I can't see a thing after start-up. The screen looks like it has vertical blue blinds on it and it is absolutely impossible to read anything. BTW, SUSE has none of these problems.

[Nobber]

I'd try booting into SUSE and copying its /etc/X11/xorg.conf file over to the Mandrake partition, and then try booting Mandrake.

[towy71]

press Ctrl+Alt+F1 which will take you to a login prompt and run drakx or somesuch which will alter the X-windows setup, possibly copying your SuSE XF86Config-4 file
HTH
Dick

[graham]

Sounds almost certainly like your monitor settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf are out of your monitor's range. From memory, SUSE and Mandriva set up their xorg.conf files slightly differently, so copying one over the other probably won't work, causing X to fail at initialisation.

Your best bet is to either select a generic and low-resolution monitor from drakx as suggested, or edit the incompatible screen mode out of the xorg.conf file.

[mugstar]

From memory, SUSE and Mandriva set up their xorg.conf files slightly differently, so copying one over the other probably won't work, causing X to fail at initialisation.

From my experience, I've never had a problem copying a working xorg.conf or X11 config from one distro to another. AFAIK, xorg neither knows nor cares which distro it's running with - the syntax of the file remains constant, and independent of anything else on the system. Copying the file over would be my preferred option...

[graham]

In theory, I agree, it should work.

But there are differences. Mandrake uses /dev/mouse while SUSE uses /dev/input/mice (9.3), for example, and the mouse driver can be configured differently. The same could be said for the modules, fonts or keyboard driver paths, and drakx would probably go and write a new one given half a chance.

[towy71]

Mandrake doesn't mind if mouse is /dev/psaux either in my experience and any of the Debian based don't seem to mind either, this is of assuming that one is using a ps2 mouse and not USB or IR or other exotic

[mugstar]

Let's find out, eh?

I have mandrake 10.1 official and suse 9.2 pro on this box - I'll copy over the xorg.conf from suse and do a reboot.

If I don't post back within an hour, someone tell alexhm to ignore my post above

EDIT:

Well, here I am, back in mandrake using the xorg.conf from suse9.2.
Looks like we were both right to a certain extent, as the fonts in KDE now seem to have got a bit larger than they were before. They're not messed up or anything, I'm probably just seeing the default suse kde font instead of the custom one I used.

There was an empty section right at the end of the suse xorg.conf as follows:

Code: Select all

Section "Extensions"
EndSection

which caused a fatal parse error the first time xorg tried to start. I commented it out, and xorg started perfectly next time (this session).

There you go then, alexhm. Two solutions for the price of one

[Guest]

If its the mandrake your monitor is messed up on then just run from command line and root access drakeconf and reslect all your monitors again...
simple..

[Guest]

I have the same problem...
My monitor is a Sony 1280x1024. However if I give The mandrake 10.0 KDE 3.2 this resolution the desktop grows and things on the borders go out of visibility. I have to set it up as if my monitor was 1024x768.
This of course wont let me take full advantage of my true resolution and fonts are not too confortable as they are blurry. I have not been able to solve this

[Guest]

If its the mandrake your monitor is messed up on then just run from command line and root access drakeconf and reslect all your monitors again...
simple..

It's actually 'drakcon' but yes, you're right.. this is the quickest and best fix if you're using mandrake.

[Guest]

bah, i cant type.. its 'drakconf' i was missing the f and the guest above me added an e.