On Thu, April 12, 2002 village idiot wrote:
>
> I have no idea about what kind of graphic card that
> sits in the pc, other then that it is 16MB of size. I
> opened up the cabinet, and took out the graphic card
> to have a looksie. All stated on it was 3dfx, so I
> suspect it is a Voodoo 2000 card of some kind.
> 

Under XFree86 4.X you can run the command "X -probeonly > xlog.log 2>&1"

Look at xlog.log for the probe details. There's a legend at the top, but
I think that (--) represents items that have been autoprobed.

My experience has been that if the card is supported, the -probeonly will
tell you (and X for that fact) all it needs to know about the card.

> I have no specifications for my monitor either, but
> that I guess is easier to get hold of, since I know
> that model. I have tried mocking a little around with
> the vertical sync rates and stuff like that, but to no
> avail so far.
>

As far as the monitor, if -probeonly can't tell you anything about it,
(like all of mine! ;^) ) then you will need to do some investigating.

If you know the make and model, try looking in the file
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/Monitors. This is a list of Make and models
for many different montors (old ones especially.) This should tell
what you need to know as far as Horizontal and Vertical Frequencies.

I just ran through this whole process with my Hitachi Laptop, trying
to get it's 1024x768 TFT Panel to work. X -probeonly told me that I had
a Chips & Technology CT65555 Graphics set AND that it had a max. dot
clock frequency of 56.125 MHz. (Not supposed to be able to do 1024x768
with that low a frequency; but it did!)

But, I also had no idea what Horz. and Vert. frequencies my LCD panel
used. I tried using all the frequecies that xf86config suggested, but
none worked (including VESA standard.) Finally, while running the machine
under Windows, I used a O-scope and an external Monitor (with the panel
enabled) to see what frequencies it WAS using.

I found out that the Panel was using 48.4KHz Hor. and 60 Hz Vert.

I read the document /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/VideoModes.doc to calculate and
generate my own Modeline with the max. dot clock rate X -probeonly reported.

With this new 1024x768 Modeline, I finally got my panel to work under X.
 
> 
> Why is this stuff easier on Linux, should be some kind
> of autodetect here...
> 

BTW, I was trying to get both RedHat 7.2 and SuSE 7.3 Linux to work! Neither
made my Hitachi Panel work Out-of-box.

If you have to, dive into that VideoModes.doc. Once you read it through, it's
really not that daunting of a task to calculate your own ModeLines.

Hope this helps!

Gerry Simmons
simmons@darykon.cet.com