[Gllug] Dell X Setup

[Mike Brodbelt]

Matthew King wrote:
> "Steve Nelson" <sanelson at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Just a shot in the dark, really, but I've been given a workstation
>> with a 19" Dell 1905FP TFT using an Intel 82865G Integrated Graphics
>> Device.  I've tried everything I can think of, but cannot get a sane
>> display - I either get 800x600, which is ludicrous, or I manage to get
>> a greater resolution, but with 8bit colour.

That chip should work pretty well. You should ideally probably use the
kernel i915 driver for it, as that will include the newest cost. Of
course the kernel driver only affects the DRI features.

> I have managed to get this chip working acceptably, more or less
> (1280x1024 is not 4x3 and everything is stretched) with the following X
> configuration (XFree4, not Xorg but that shouldn't make much
> difference):
> 
> Section "Device"
>         Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
>         Driver          "i810"
>         BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
>         VideoRam        65536
> EndSection
> 
> Section "Monitor"
>         Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
>         HorizSync       30-69
>         VertRefresh     50-120
>         Option          "DPMS"
> EndSection
> 
> Then, of course, listing 1280x1024 in the Modes line.
> 
> I also load i810 on startup but I'm not certain that's required.

It shouldn't be, but it doesn't do any harm. I imagine you're talking
about the kernel module there anyway, which makes no difference to 2D
performance.

> Note, however, that I use a CRT not a TFT.

That doesn't really matter to X.

> Also, I'm not 100% sure *how* the above snippet works, just that it
> does, for me. I got it after much pain (using the machine as an X
> terminal with read-only NFS root is only the start), poking and randomly
> changing settings to see what happened.

A recent version of the i810 X driver should just work with this chip.
The specs are available, and Intel do a good job on graphics support (in
fact they're pretty much the *only* vendor that provides useful graphics
support). If you're having trouble I'd recommend using the newest X
release you can though, as it takes a while for the code to trickle down
into distributions. I have an Intel 945 chipset on my machine at work,
and needed to grab driver and Mesa packages from Debian experimental to
get that working properly.

> Specifically the VideoRam line may not actually have any relevance to
> anything.

The Intel chipsets tend to nick memory from system RAM, rather than
having dedicated VRAM. That line controls how much memory is used. It
*should* autodetect a reasonable value, but sometimes doesn't, and you
end up with too little memory for some functions (like h/w OpenGL).

HTH,

Mike
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