Help Please Setting Up New Display & Graphics Card

English Hardware
#1

Sadly my wonderful 40 kg IBM 220 crt based monitor has died and I am now having to set up a new wide screen led display. First surprise was that when I went to System Settings > Display & Monitor there were no resolution settings offered, only Screen Locker.

I have a Radeon HD6450 graphics adapter so read up a bit on SDB:Radeon wiki and now wonder if it is working as it should. I tried the test suggested in that wiki running

glxgears

but nothing happened and I had a command not found message.

My boot loader has VGA mode as unspecified and console resolution autodetect by grub2. I should add that I am connected using D-Sub via KVM switch and this may prevent me from getting the most out of my WXDA? screen.

It seems I do have the radeon driver:-

alastair@ibmserver2:~> lsmod | grep radeon
radeon               1703936  11 
ttm                   106496  1 radeon
drm_kms_helper        139264  1 radeon
drm                   385024  14 ttm,drm_kms_helper,radeon
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 radeon
alastair@ibmserver2:~>

Bottom line is that I have a graphics screen although it will take some getting used to but I cannot adjust anything other than by using some of the menu controls on the display device itself. What am I doing wrong please?

Budgie2

#2

Hi
What about the xrandr command?

If you skip the switch and connect it direct what happens?

#3

glxgears is in the Mesa-demo-x package you must install to run

#4

Got it thanks. Works a treat!

#5

Found an article about xrandr today and it works and gives me many options. Have tried a few and I guess it is just a matter of getting used to the new screen. It is the text that is rubbish; faded, imprecise and with less contrast than I like. Graphics are totally brilliant.

It is not practicable to try this at present but will keep in mind. Unfortunately my KVM switch is quite old and only does D-Sub (analogue?)
Cannot afford/justify a new switch at this point.

Will keep on with experimenting. Thanks for the help.
Best wishes,
Budgie2

#6

If the KVM does not pass through the monitor resolution data (EDID) you can add what you need to the xorg.conf.d files Then they should appear in the KDE set up screens

To calc the modeline needed for a given res

http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl

or gtf program

#7

Hi and thanks. Some info is getting back to the workstation box and it seems the display defaults to 1920 x 1080 which is the recommended resolution on my accounting Windoze 7 machine. I guess I can get used to the outrageously wide screen. I just hope the line wrap works OK for this message as it has only just started a new line with this sentence at “has.” Script is very small so eyes may get tired. We shall see. Meanwhile what is not OK are the icons in the task manager bar at the bottom of the screen. How may I increase the size of these?

#8

On Sun 04 Sep 2016 05:16:01 PM CDT, Budgie2 wrote:

Hi and thanks. Some info is getting back to the workstation box and it
seems the display defaults to 1920 x 1080 which is the recommended
resolution on my accounting Windoze 7 machine. I guess I can get used
to the outrageously wide screen. I just hope the line wrap works OK for
this message as it has only just started a new line with this sentence
at “has.” Script is very small so eyes may get tired. We shall see.
Meanwhile what is not OK are the icons in the task manager bar at the
bottom of the screen. How may I increase the size of these?

Hi
Increase the zoom on firefox? Hit ctrl and a +

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE Leap 42.1|GNOME 3.16.2|4.1.27-27-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

#9

If text is too small in general increase font size and/or change dots per inch. If KDE then Configure desktop - Application Appearance - Fonts

#10

Hi Malcolm, Yes this works and will help if I do get eye fatigue but at present, with brightness reduced to 50% and resolution set at 1920 x 1080 text is good and clear. It is only the icons in the task bar that are minute. For example the Thunderbird icon measures less than 2mm in diameter. It is this that I want to increase and there is room for an increase in width of taskbar too.

#11

Hi and thanks. It is not the font size that is the problem however but icons in the taskbar. How and where can these be changed?

#12

You can adjust the panel height. This will scale the icons accordingly…

Right-click on the panel > Panel Options > Panel Settings

#13

So it does. Many thanks. Silly me. I was looking for how to adjust the icon size. Never realized it was done by magic. Brilliant and thanks again. Budgie2

#14

My troubles with new display have returned. When resuming after a period of not being used the screen would wake up with colours “inverted.” I could just about make out enough to log out and then when logging back in all was as it should be until today when screen reported signal “out of range.” With no control I thought I would try a forced re-boot. This gave me the BIOS dialogue and scrolling boot processes (I keep it visible).

There was an error on one line concerning VGA which stated that there was no EDID ? for display or words to that effect. Towards the end of booting when usually I would get the log in screen etc, the screen went black and I had the “out of range” message and was back where I started.

Writing this on another machine. Before I start pulling cards and such, how may I force a boot to VGA resolution so I can access the system?

#15

Boot up with the ‘nomodeset’ parameter. You can temporily add this following this procedure at the grub2 boot menu screen

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.grub2.html#sec.grub2.menu_change

#16

Hi Deano,
Many thanks. After a bit of fiddling I managed to start in safe mode and have been able to use Yast to include nomodeset in kernel parameters. The machine now boots to VGA and I have a display but it is almost unusable.

I am trying to understand the process a bit more now. The line I saw during the original boot process suggested some sort of interrogation of the display which found no recognizable EDID. I am not sure where this originates, the graphics adapter, operating system or even the KVM. Also I have no idea where the fault lies, with os, card or screen. It does occur to me however that since my installation is static I should be able to set the parameters rather than have them adjust each time I switch between systems. (As I advised above, the screen is used by two or three workstations with KVM to switch between them).

Do you have any thoughts or ideas on where I should concentrate my efforts?
Regards,
Budgie2

#17

That’s because using nomodeset causes a basic framebuffer driver to be loaded (with limited display resolution).

I am trying to understand the process a bit more now. The line I saw during the original boot process suggested some sort of interrogation of the display which found no recognizable EDID. I am not sure where this originates, the graphics adapter, operating system or even the KVM. Also I have no idea where the fault lies, with os, card or screen. It does occur to me however that since my installation is static I should be able to set the parameters rather than have them adjust each time I switch between systems. (As I advised above, the screen is used by two or three workstations with KVM to switch between them).

Do you have any thoughts or ideas on where I should concentrate my efforts?
Regards,
Budgie2

The Xorg log (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) is the place to look when diagnosing issues like these. However, since you mentioned that you’re using a KVM, that it is a likely/common cause of display mode issues due to driver not being able to obtain the EDID from the connected display. It is still possible to manually configure Xorg to get around issues like this if necessary.

#18

There are numerous web pages dealing with this topic, but just to give you the idea (sorry they’re old pages)…

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/453790-11-3-Display-problem-using-KVM-switch
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/12/15/best-linux-and-kvm-switch-practices/

#19

Hi Deano,
I have looked at forcing the resolution by editing grub but it does not offer the resolution I need of 1920x1080. I do have some timing data from the display manual so could look at building line but most of the
tools are very old, I don’t have the dot frquency and I don’t want to damage my new screen.

I understand the point about the KVM being possible cause but there are two issues which seem strange:-

  1. It had been working fine and I didn’t change anything.
  2. Everything works on the windoze 7 system which is one of the other workstations connected to the KVM.

Will try some hardware changes now before I return for help to see if I can prove the fault lies with the KVM.
Regards and thanks,
Budgie2

#20

Hi Deano,

I think I have cracked it and am reporting here in case others have same problem.

The problem was with the way I set up the KVM switch (as you suggested) and was only apparent on the openSUSE machine because of the way grub has been set up.

When booting the screen properties are not fixed but grub looks to the display for the EDID. In my case the display is replaced by the KVM ‘local’ transmitter. The EDID info in the KVM local transmitter is taken from the ‘remote’ transmitter which interrogates the display, but ONLY when being turned on. It stores this info for use when interrogated by the ‘local’ device.

It is essential therefore to turn the system on in the right sequence: 1st turn on display, then the ‘remote’ KVM box connected to the display, then the ‘local’ KVM box connected to the computer and then boot. If not done in this order the information passed to the computer on booting can be unreliable or invalid. I should add this is with an ADDER X2 KVM device, others may work differently.

I had no knowledge or at least memory of this and have been using the Adder KVM for about 10 years but only now had an issue with display.
Hope this is clear and may be helpful to others.
Budgie2