MEPIS Community Forum

As it's Christmas, I'm doing some more configuring of my father's new M11 Linux machine. Today's special area of concern is his widescreen monitor, actually a AOC LCD TV. Unfortunately, AOC appears to be the sort of manufacturer that would rather provide as little support as possible for past years' models, and this particular model (AOC L19WH961) has no recommended timings in MonitorsDB. The resolution now (1024x768) is better than it was originally (640x480), when I first booted the M11 installer, ran hwinfo & edited its timings into xorg.conf, but the aspect ratio is wrong and I've seen this monitor reach higher resolutions in XP.

I suspect I should be able to discover better safe timings from equivalent LCD displays. I'm reasoning that lcd displays of the same physical size (19") and same maximum resolution (1366x768, 60Hz) would share similar timings. Maybe I could even find a xorg.conf modeline someone had written for such a display.

Does this make sense? Can you suggest a database or search terms I might not have thought of, or does someone in the mepis community have a monitor like my father's?

If you asked two weeks ago I could have given the info before upgrading my monitor. I got my 17" AOC working with the cheat code VGA=788. That gave me a 1280x1024 resolution.

This may help: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php? ... resolution

It would help if we knew the video chipset/card that you are going to use.

Yes, it's a GeForce 8300, from lspci,
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C77 [GeForce 8300] (rev a2)

When I ran hwinfo, this chipset reported timings which I entered into xorg.conf, which now appear too conservative. They were:
HorizSync 31.0 - 48.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 90.0

Running xrandr, a maximum resolution is given:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 175, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1024 x 768

I found some information about the display from this PDF, http://www.abt.com/documents/24789/Spec_L19W961.pdf (but no timings) But I know this monitor is capable of 1366x768, so I expect the timings would be greater too. I don't know how much greater, but I expect they should be similar to another lcd tv with the same maximum resolution.

There has one other problem. Whenever I attempt to test X from a root console the system appears to hang. The screen goes black and I must reset the pc because it does not respond to either Alt-Ctl-Bksp or Alt-Ctl-Delete. This has happened with both /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /root/xorg.conf.new. I'm going to attempt logging in with ssh next, because neither dmesg nor Xorg.log.old have shown any errors after rebooting. So there may be a bug in the video driver.

Thank you for any assistance you can offer.

Have you tried running nvidia-settings ?
It's a nice gui for setting up the nvidia driver. It gives a pulldown list of available resolutions and if you apply one and don't click on the "keep this setting" after the switch it will automatically revert in 15 seconds.

Thank you, that was exactly what we needed. I had overlooked that utility, but running it this time I found a resolution for 1360x768. So simple!

Incidentally, I discovered that Xorg was running (almost) normally when I'd run it from console, only that it responded to the mouse only and ignored keyboard input. I'd been expecting the dithered grey screen, and monochrome X cursor did not immediately appear, perhaps because I hadn't moved the trackball. But once I'd logged in with ssh I was able to kill the X process.

But I won't need to test X any further, because we've got the screen resolution we were looking for. Thanks for the tip!