On 04/03/2008 06:45 PM, John F. Morse wrote:
> Most of my GNU/Linux installations use Debian 3.1, with older Ubuntu,
> Fedora Core, Lindows, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, etc. IIRC, these all
> use XFree86, and I had to learn to fine-tune it over the years.
>
> Debian 4.0 uses X.Org.
>
> I presently have a "portable" ViewSonic 21 monitor plugged into one
> Debian box, which I have recently upgraded from Sarge to Etch, and now
> cannot get a higher resolution than 640x480. This is, of course, a
> ridiculous resolution for a 21" screen.
>
> Even trying other multiscan/multifrequency 17" and "dumb" 15" monitors
> will not allow any resolution change.
>
> To make matters worse, the detected Trident video card causes a failure
> when xorg tries to initialize a screen.
>
> Of course the TTY terminals all work, so I do have access to vi for
> xorg.conf edits. The only method I've found to startx for a GUI DE is to
> manually edit xorg.conf and replace "trident" with "vesa" as the driver.
>
> Running "dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xorg-server" will only rebuild
> xorg.conf back to the detected trident driver.
>

Try this instead:
dpkg-reconfigure -plow xserver-xorg

> The monitor frequency rates also makes no difference if I edit xorg.conf
> and change them to the correct values for the monitor.
>

Well that confuses me, since that was going to be my first suggestion of
something to look into.

> The Trident video card has sufficient memory, and is used in eleven
> other identical PCs which run Debian Sarge fine under XFree86. However
> Sarge support is ending so I must upgrade to Etch as time permits.
>
> Below is the total /var/log/Xorg.0.log for examination (the font
> problems are of no concern).
>
> Perhaps someone has an idea that I might try? The xorg.conf can also be
> posted if requested.
>
> These Debian servers all run headless anyway, but at this point in time,
> I'd certainly like to find and resolve this X.Org resolution problem.
>
> TIA.
> [...]
>

Xorg reports 1024KiB of memory for your card--is this true?

Try to disable direct rendering for right now. You probably don't need
DRI on a server anyway.

Also, try to use a lower color depth; you're using 24 bits right now;
perhaps you need to change that to 16.