MEPIS Community Forum

this is ridiculous, nothing seems to work

Usually if you're running a PCIe, PCI, or AGB video card the BIOS setting will disable the onboard graphics. Mine has a 'if no graphics card slot is used, use the onboard'. But it's worth a try to disable the onboard just in case.

Yep something strange going on for sure. Found a review on your board & i am reading right the video chip is in the processor, no clue about that cause i am not up on intel stuff, i have used amd for years. (seems more bang for buck to me) Only thing i can guess is that may be interfering with recognition of system and hardware. I have had problems with 200 nvidia chips but nothing like this sorry.

Maybe some familiar with intel will have a clue, but at this point the only thing a can suggest is try on board video, from what i read its better these days. Good luck

It's barely possible that a late kernel version would help things. Which should be doable even with 800x600.

Were you able to disable the on-board video in the BIOS?

From your xorg.conf


The Horizontal Sync of the BenQ 24" monitor I looked up is 83kHz. Given the 31 - 48 KHz restriction in the xorg.conf I suspect 800x600 is the highest resolution available in that refresh range. Try changing it to something like 31-110 then rebooting.

If that doesn't work it may be due to the Intel video chipset on your Motherboard hijacking the process. If you connect the monitor the the MB video out instead of the nVidia card & use the xdrvr=intel cheatcode from the LiveDVD you should get usable video at the correct resolution.

The onboard graphics was disabled in the BIOS

I tried to use the onboard graphics but that just gave me nothing as in nothing at all. changing the horizontal sync did nothing unfortunately. I have now tried every option that smxi/sgfxi gives with varying results from nothing to max of 640x480 to 800x600 with no other options from the beta driver.

When you tried the onboard graphics did you remove the video card from its slot? I should add that a newer kernel is almost certainly needed for it to work.

How do I get a newer kernel? More importantly is why should I need it to get simple graphics to work

I'm guessing that the chipset in your motherboard is not supported with the standard kernel that comes with Mepis. You can wait for Mepis 12 or enable (by entering it in Synaptic or manually in /etc/apt/sources.list) the debian backports repository and install the latest available kernel from there.
backports: deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ squeeze-backports main

It has a 3.2 kernel available.

There is a 2.6.39 kernel in our Community Repositories that may be late enough to help. You might want to try it first. They are easily installed or removed using Synaptic. Just reboot and choose the newest kernel choice at the GRUB boot screen. You will have to reinstall the nvidia driver (after booting into the new kernel) if you wish to use your card.

Personally I don't think you should have had this much trouble. But that's a price we pay for using Mepis. I purchased a new motherboard several years ago and found that it would not boot Mepis. I was stuck until the next version came out. Fortunately there were enough other people that it didn't take very long to get a fix out.
For the latest hardware there are better choices OOTB than Mepis. You pay a price for stability and having everything come from Warren Woodford. Most of us think it's worth it.

What BenQ 24" display at 1920x1080 native resolution are you using (exact model number for it)?

With quick google searches, I see lots of threads about problems with the way some of the BenQ displays are being detected (not only with linux, but with windows, too).

The solution I see posted about some of them is creating an EDID file with the correct information about it, and there are a number of free utilities around designed to poll monitors for more info that you can copy the results from and paste into an ESSID file, after modifying it to correct any incorrect information the monitor is returning to those types of detection utilities (which appears to be the case with some BenQ displays, causing issues because they're not returning correct information to display detection routines).

I've even found some forum threads with people that understand that kind of thing offering to correct the files collected by those utilities (since some of the BenQ monitors appear to be returning incorrect information about the needed settings to utilities polling monitor information).

You say that a newer Nvidia Driver and utilities are installed, right (and I'd use the sgfxi script to do that, as pointed out in previous posts)?

IOW, if you look under KMenu>Settings>More Applications, you should see a menu choice to start Nvidia X Server Settings.

Does that work, and do you see information about your display under it's X-Server Display Configuration menu option?

It should show you buttons to detect displays, set resolution (using either Auto or setting it manually) and more.

If the Nvidia driver is being used and your monitor is showing up in that program, yet the available resolution options are not correct, then you may need to load a corrected EDID file for your specific display model.

If you expand the GPU0 choice on the left side of the Nvidia X-Server Settings program, you should find a menu choice in that section labeled something like DFP-0 with the model of the display being detected. On the screen you get using that menu option, you'll see a button to load an EDID file (and if you have one that has the correct parameters for your display in it, that may solve the issue if your system is trying to use the correct Nvidia driver and just doesn't understand enough about the monitor being detected).

So, I'd let us know the exact model of the display you're using and perhaps we can figure out a way to find you an EDID file that works with it.

That may not be the issue. But, given that I do find threads about incorrect monitor detection causing problems with resolution settings with some BenQ displays, I'd probably try loading a corrected EDID file for it to see if it's just a problem with the way it's being detected.

Edited to correct term for EDID (incorrectly used ESSID versus EDIT to begin with).