Linux Mint Forums

I have 4 computers running XFCE Mint. The fourth was just recently installed. I am getting duplicate images, one offset horizontally about 1/4" on a 17" screen when running movies with VLC which works fine on all computers otherwise. Mplayer will not open any files on the fourth computer but works perfectly on all others.

The computer is a ECS 761GX-M754 motherboard with AMD Sempron 3000+, 1.5 g Crucial memory, SIS on board video that produces about 40 fps full screen on a Compac FP monitor. One of the other computers is much older and has a PC Chips mother board (made by ECS), Geode 1750 NX CPU with 500 M memory and similar SIS on board video and works fine.

I tried switching the DVD drives around and they all work fine in all the other computers.

It appears that there are two paths from the DVD to the Monitor. Both images are distinct.

I have seen a similar problem in the forum and I believe I solved it, but now I don't find it. I can't figure out what to search for, but if you find the right search phrase I think you'll find the solution unless the SIS is a problem
I don't think this is a problem in your case, but I hope you do have the right driver
I'll mark this as unsolved in my notes

Thanks for your reply.

I am located in Belize where power costs 4 times as much as in the US so I would like to use the onboard graphics instead of a add on graphics card. The computer I am experimenting with is for very low total power consumption. Running at 1.8 ghz it draws 100 watts including monitor and 60 watts when cool n quiet takes over and the monitor goes off.

Anyway, the on board graphics is described in the instruction book that came with the motherboard as follows:

Built-in floating point format VLIW triangle engine
Built-in an 1T piplined 128-bit BITBLT graphics engine
Built-ion Direct Draw & GDI+ Accelerator
Supports up to 2040 x 2048 testure size

I am not sure what all that means but it works fine with Mr. Bean movies read from hard drive. No jerkiness, perfect graphics.

I do not have on hand a spare PCI Express graphics card or I would see if the graphics are o.k. that way when reading files from the DVD, but it does not seem like that is where the problem lies.

Problem solved. I checked xorg.conf and noticed that it called for "sis" driver. Doing a little further investigation at the SIS site I could only find reference to drivers for use with add on cards. Then I booted Knoppix and they set up vesa drivers. So I thought I should try "vesa". Sure enough it worked.

Maybe that should be done when there is no add on video card during the install.

It seems that I have two accounts on the Forum. One freemart and one phil. We are the same.

Freemart is not logged in - phil is
Ok the vesa driver is the emergency solution - a driver that always works, but is really crappy
Check the other computers - I doubt they use vesa and I believe that sis is the right driver.
But what the heck - it works

SIS does not indicate on their web site that they have a Linux driver, only a Windows driver. I searched their install disk also, nada.

Two of my other computers have add on nVidia cards. The motherboards do not have onboard video. The 6 year old Geode does not have an add on video card, I will check it for the type of video driver. It was an unadulterated Mint Daryna beta 08 install.

Check synaptic - there is a driver
xserver-xorg-video-sis