New Monitor Weirdnesses or how do I get Xorg to pay attention to my xorg.conf file?

[Dave Airlie]

On 4 December 2015 at 12:27, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> At Thu, 3 Dec 2015 16:27:22 -0500 Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Robert Heller composed on 2015-12-03 16:00 (UTC-0500):
>>
>> > I use a distro with long term support.
>>
>> Not without a price. What you have is hardware technology that is more
>> advanced than the foundation on which that support is built. A GeForce 8200
>> needs either the FOSS nouveau driver, which seems to be missing from CentOS
>> 5, or the proprietary NVidia driver. VESA is a low technology fallback driver
>> wholly incapable of properly supporting widescreen displays. AFAICT, there's
>> no amount of xorg.conf or xrandr twiddling you can do to overcome the
>> shortcomings of a fallback driver.
>
> The video chipset has been working fine with the CentOS software, with a 4:3
> monitor. The (available) proprietary NVidia driver won't work with a Xen
> kernel.

The graphics card BIOS contains the modes that vesa can use. It doesn't have
widescreen modes in it. The below 3 choices are yours.

CentOS6 should drive things better in theory.

Dave.
>
>>
>> >  *I* have better things to do than
>> > spend all of my time dealing with incompatible updates every few months.
>>
>> You have 3 choices that I can see:
>>
>> 1-upgrade software to the technology level of your hardware (nouveau driver,
>> likely requiring KMS kernel)
>>
>> 2-backlevel your video hardware (either supported gfxcard, or supported 4:3
>> or 5:4 aspect display)
>>
>> 3-suffer a standard aspect video mode on your widescreen display
>
> --
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