I have been using a polaroid 26 or 27 inch tv LCD as my monitor with VGA cable. I installed opensuse using this LCD tv.
Today i got a new tonshiba 22 inch tv model:22LV505
So i plug in my VGA cable to the new TV but all i get is a blank screen. I restart and no picture shows up (not even BIOS). So i pull out my Toshiba manual and it tells me to set my computer to 60 HZ refresh screen first before plugging in PC.
The manual says has the following
Monitor Display modes:
VGA 640 x 480 60 Hz
VGA 720 x 400 70 Hz
SVGA 800 x 600 60 Hz
XGA 1024 x 768 60 Hz
WXGA 1280 x 768 60 Hz
WXGA 1280 x 720 60 Hz
WXGA 1360 x 768 60 Hz
Back on my old LCD TV
In opensuse i go “display settings” from the bottom panel (next to Ethernet connection).
the display settings show that i have 1280 x 1024 75 Hz.
I tried setting the resolution and refresh rate to the ones displayed in the manual, then switching the VGA cable to my new TV. But all i get is a blank screen.
I need help :shame:
I had similar problems with a 32" TV which should accept VGA 1360 x 768 at 60 Hz according to the manual, but it doesn’t, at least in a dual monitor setup (didn’t try it single yet). The nearest I could get was 1280 x 768, and that in XP.
I suggest you start with 1024 x 768 @ 50 or 60 Hz, it seems to work with most flat panels and is standard in most monitor definitions suse/yast has.
I couldn’ use the full (native) res/freq in suse yet, I think because the TV/monitor is not recognized/defined. I’m sure if you set the correct res/freq manually (with xrandr, for instance) or create the res/freq definitions in xorg.conf it will work.
i returned the toshiba and now got a westinghouse SK-26H730s
It is 26 inches wide-screen
This TV also gets no picture >:(
At least with this westinghouse i could view Bios and every seems to be fine until the opensuse splash
Im very new at linux. So i dont know what xconfig is.
ok so i went into failsafe and put VGA=0:1024:768:@60 as boot option (instead of Vga="default). Dont know why i did that but it showed a whole bunch of text (my pc was in 720 x 400 @ 70 hz) and then log in. I put in my username and pw. then i put su and pw. after i put sax2.
I dont know what compelled me into doing all of this but by the grace of god or dumb luck my monitor gets autodetected. Turns out that the monitor was listed under WDE instead of winstinghouse.
Anyways reboot. I think i did shutdown -r now.
So i restart my pc and run Opensuse regular mode. Splash screen does not show up. My monitor says no signal. But after i hear the sound that the pc has loaded i see my opensuse desktop rotfl! .
Now the display says 1024 x 768 @ 75 hz. Everything looks and responds nice but my manual does not say it has support for 75hz. The manual recommends 1360-6 x 768 @ 60 hz.
Should this be something to worry about?
Also what i noticed if i press control alt del my pc gets no signal again on my westinghouse but if i plug in my old monitor i get a signal 600 x 800 i believe. Everything is Huge and i can log in (i get no signal). But when i switch the cable to my new tv (westinghouse) i get signal.
Sorry for the late response.
First of all you really should avoid connecting/disconnecting cables with your computer and/or displays on. It’s very bad to your hardware health.
Second, there are different drivers and resolutions acting during boot. First you have a very basic should-work-with-all-boards graphics driver that shows the boot selection screen, then a framebuffer that shows somewhat better graphics as the computer stars, then your video-card-specific driver is loaded (Nvidia, ATI, Intel, etc.), and kdm or gdm starts loading the DE (KDE, Gnome, etc.) which may yet change your configuration.
You could try setting the vga=0xNNN boot option (where NNN represents a supported resolution at boot, try 317 or 31a). Usually this is set by the system.
If you use vga=normal you’ll have a text display, IIRC.
If you can’t see the boot screen to set these options you can change this in Yast > System > Bootloader.
There are a lot of posts about this in the forum, try searching for “vga=”.
AFAIK most LCD panels support 60 and 75 Hz to be compatible with most video cards. LCD’s don’t have to refresh to avoid flickering as CRT monitors do. If you run at 60Hz you’ll have the same display quality as at 75 (or 200Hz). However your video card will run faster and thus hotter. I’d try to stick to 60 Hz to honor the manual, there might be some problem I’m not aware of.
Probably you can’t set a lower freq because the monitor your system is set to don’t have this definition. You could try setting it as generic LCD, but I don’t really know.
thanks for the information (esp the note on plugging/unplugging).
I changed it so that during boot i get a text based boot and not the splash. Ctrl Alt Del shows up on my screen now, i think my system just needed a reboot.
It was frustrating getting this to work but searching this forum helped and also the responses in this thread. I must say it may take some time to configure some things in opensuse but in the end it is satisfying.