[Nottingham] NVidia cards and Monitor Frequency

[David Aldred]

Evening, all!

I'm having a spot of bother getting two Linux machines to play nicely with 
Quake3....

The issue is that when I start the game on either machine, the result is a 
blank monitor screen with a (monitor-generated) message saying "out of 
frequency".   The only way to restore normality is to go to another 
virtual terminal and kill the X-session.

The OS on the machine in front of me is Kubuntu 9.10; the standard xorg.conf 
file is minimal for this distro.  I'm using the NVidia restricted drivers and 
the rewritten xorg.conf is:

==============================================================================
# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0  (buildmeister at builder63)  Tue Oct 20 21:00:15 
PDT 2009


Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"    
EndSection                                   

Section "Files"
EndSection     

Section "InputDevice"

    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0" 
    Driver         "mouse"  
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"  
EndSection                               

Section "InputDevice"

    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 60.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1024x768_75 +0+0; 1024x768 +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

========================================================================

The figures for HorizSync and VertRefresh are both taken from the monitor 
manual; the monitor's resolution is described in the manual as '1024x768 
(75Hz)'.

Of course, I can't tell what error messages may be written to the console as 
they are on the console in the X-session I have to kill!

The second machine is very similar; the only real difference is that's it's an 
older NVidia-based card and it's on Ubuntu 9.04 instead of Kubuntu 9.10.  It's 
the same NVidia driver and the same monitor, though.

Any suggestions most welcome....

-- 
David Aldred