LinuxMint v14 Nadia - Display problem...

[tenfoot]

My set up:

Desktop.
Processor: 4 x AMDFX-4100 Quad core.
Video: GeForce GT430/PCIe/SSE2
Monitor: LG Electronics 23"
Resolution: 1920 x 1080 at 60Hz

Downloaded LinuxMint v14 x64 yesterday. Running from LiveCD worked perfectly, so installed to HD and experienced problems.

(1) Would not boot to display. That is, the boot process appeared to complete but there was no display on the monitor. The monitor power light flashed intermittently but that was all.

(2) Booted in Safe Mode. Chose first option (default boot) and was presented with an ugly display!

(3) Went to Display Monitor options and found that the only choices I had were 1024 x 768 (which was highlighted) and 800 x 600 and the the word Laptop was displayed.

(4) Clicked on Detect Display but nothing happened.

(5) Elected to install the 104 updates which were waiting, hoping that would make a difference. It didn't.

I seek the help of the combined wisdom of members to get me out of this problem.

Regards from New Zealand.

[lperg]

No solution I'm afraid, but I can confirm the problem: latest 32-bit Mint/Cinnamon with all the updates, installed on a desktop with Pentium Dual Core E2180 2 GHz, Acer 24" monitor with native resolution 1920x1080 (which works at that resolution in Ubuntu 11.04), NVidia GT-218 with open-source driver. "Detect displays" has absolutely no effect, and the "Displays" settings program claims the computer is a laptop.

--LP--

[tenfoot]

No solution I'm afraid, but I can confirm the problem: latest 32-bit Mint/Cinnamon with all the updates, installed on a desktop with Pentium Dual Core E2180 2 GHz, Acer 24" monitor with native resolution 1920x1080 (which works at that resolution in Ubuntu 11.04), NVidia GT-218 with open-source driver. "Detect displays" has absolutely no effect, and the "Displays" settings program claims the computer is a laptop.

--LP--

Glad I'm not alone Now to wait for the solution. I've been using Mint since v3.0 and this is the first occasion that my monitor has not been detected correctly..

[cwsnyder]

I have had problems with my display not being properly detected since I switched to Linux back in late 2007.

Manual configuration consists of the following steps:
1) Install the package x11-xserver-utils if it is not already installed.
2) Open a terminal. The following commands are from the terminal. xrandr is a terminal command used by your Settings >> Display menu command to set your display settings. cvt is one of the commands to give you the settings needed to set your X11 to your display requirements.
3)

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cws@cwshome$xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0* 
   800x600        60.3     56.2 
   640x480        59.9 
cws@cwshome:~$ cvt 1920 1080 60
# 1920x1080 59.96 Hz (CVT 2.07M9) hsync: 67.16 kHz; pclk: 173.00 MHz
Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  173.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
cws@cwshome:~$

Whatever is reported after the xrandr command at the beginning of the line which here reads VGA-1 connected is the output which X11 uses for your monitor. There may be multiple displays listed if you have multiple displays connected. If your response to xrandr includes a line reporting an error in reading gamma from your display, VGA-1 will be replaced by default, and this method will not work. Go to the next method.
4)

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cws@cwshome:~$ xrandr --newmode 1920x1080 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
cws@cwshome:~$ xrandr --addmode VGA-1 1920x1080
cws@cwshome:~$

Again, use the response from xrandr for your display, rather than VGA-1 if it is different. Yo must have the name of the mode enclosed in quotes if you have any spaces or underscores in the mode name. You can copy the numbers from the Modeline to after the mode name in the '--newmode' line by copy and paste to prevent typographical errors. This is a copy of my terminal & responses, yours will be different.
5) If you check with xrandr, you should now get something similar to this:

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cws@cwshome$xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0* 
   800x600        60.3     56.2 
   640x480        59.9 
   1920x1080       60.0
cws@cwshome:~$

You can now go to your menu entry and select the 1920x1080 display resolution, and it should work. If it does, you can reboot to your hard drive, use your Ctrl-Alt-F1 key combination to open a terminal session when you have booted, and re-enter the above commands to get your display configured. To set your display from the terminal so that your graphical session is usable, use the commands xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode 1920x1080 with the appropriate changes to the entry to reflect your display name and wanted mode. Now you can return to the GUI session by pressing the Ctrl-Alt-F7 key combination.
6) To make this change permanent, you can either enter the needed commands in a script which executes when you boot your computer, or you can include the commands in Lightdm or gdm execution scripts.


Alternative methods where this does not work are outlined in http://www.wikihow.com/Configure-X11-in-Linux

[lperg]

Unfortunately the method posted by cwsnyder does not work for me (I get the "error in reading gamma"), and the alternative method from http://www.wikihow.com/Configure-X11-in-Linux seems to have become obsolete: neither Mint 14 nor Kubuntu 12.10 have an xorg.conf anywhere (but Ubuntu 11.04 and PCLinuxOS 12.2, which find the correct resolution, do have it as expected in their respective /etc/X11/)

--LP--

[adamir]

How to make xorg.conf is explained in http://askubuntu.com/questions/129941/my-ubuntu-12-04-has-no-xorg-conf-is-that-normal

[lperg]

Unfortunately, the method outlined in http://askubuntu.com/questions/129941/m ... hat-normal or in http://www.wikihow.com/Configure-X11-in-Linux does not work for me: at the root prompt, Xorg -configure churns for a few seconds and exits withe the message "fatal server error: could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock"

That error message seems to be very common, according to Google, and is due (if I understand the rather confused discussions in various places) to the file system being read-only in recovery mode, which would mean that nobody could ever make that method work! I'm missing something...

And http://wiki.x.org/ is having trouble: Error 503 Service Unavailable

--LP--

[cwsnyder]

When you get the error message "fatal server error: could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock", you can simply open a terminal and issue the command sudo rm -f /tmp/.tX0-lock to remove the lock file and you should be able to continue. This is probably left from some earlier attempt to reconfigure which failed, or was interrupted before it completed.

[lperg]

When you get the error message "fatal server error: could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock", you can simply open a terminal and issue the command sudo rm -f /tmp/.tX0-lock to remove the lock file and you should be able to continue. This is probably left from some earlier attempt to reconfigure which failed, or was interrupted before it completed.

I did that and that's when I got the "could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock" error I mentioned above. It turns out that the disk is read-only and needs to be remounted read-write. When I do that, Xorg -configure does run with output that scrolls off the screen, but it ends with yet another error:
"Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices. Configuration failed with error(2)"

There is an xorg.conf.new in /root and indeed it contains four Monitor and four Device sections, as well as four Screen entries in the ServerLayout section. I tried to comment out all but the first of each of those, copy it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot, but that has no effect at all, the desired resolution is not there.

--LP--

[cwsnyder]

Try the following as your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

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# This file was generated by failsafeDexconf, using
# values from the debconf database and some overrides to use vesa mode.
#
# You should use dexconf or another such tool for creating a "real" xorg.conf
# For example:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen      0  "Default Screen" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Configured Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

#Section "Module"  # modules for nVidia display card
#    Load           "glx"
#    Load           "v4l"
#EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Configured Monitor"
    VendorName     "Generic LCD Display"
    ModelName      "LCD Panel 1280x1024"
    HorizSync       31.5 - 64.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 65.0
    Gamma           1
    ModeLine       "640x480@60" 25.2 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync
    ModeLine       "800x600@56" 36.0 800 824 896 1024 600 601 603 625 +hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "800x600@60" 40.0 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "1024x768@60" 65.0 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
    ModeLine       "1280x960@60" 102.1 1280 1360 1496 1712 960 961 964 994 -hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "1280x1024@60" 108.0 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync
    Modeline      "1920x1080@60"  173.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "Configured Video Device"
    Monitor        "Configured Monitor"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Virtual     1600 1600
        Depth       24
        Modes      "1920x1080@60" "1280x1024@60" "1024x768@60" "1280x960@60" "800x600@60" "800x600@56" "640x480@60"
    EndSubSection
EndSection


Logging out and logging back in should re-do your X, you shouldn't need to restart.

[lperg]

Try the following as your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

That makes things much worse: The splash page is OK, but the login page is split into six vertical stripes, the four middle ones containing each a copy of the login screen, squashed horizontally and looking washed out, while the two outer stripes contain respectively the right and the left half of a login page. I can log in "blind" but everything is still scrambled into six stripes, each of which has a mouse pointer, looks like my desktop, but they are totally illegible.

Some questions about this version of xorg.conf:
- The "module" section is commented out for nVidia display card, but I do have such a card, a GT-218. Should I uncomment one or both of these modules?
- In the "monitor" section, shouldn't there a "DisplaySize 1920 1080" to force it to the correct value? Also, the numbers for
HorizSync 31.5 - 64.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 65.0
are different from the ones I had obtained in my last attempt, which despite producing an error message had created an xorg.conf.new in which the values were
HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0

Thanks,

--LP--

[cwsnyder]

Submitted in error

[cwsnyder]

The values which I wrote in the example were copied almost exactly from my 1280x1024 display, so OF COURSE I didn't get it right.

I attempted to get the xorg.conf file as display card neutral as I knew how to make it, so, yes, you may want to remove the comments from the module section. The following is the actual xorg.conf file which I last used before it stopped working.

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# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0  (buildmeister@builder63)  Mon Mar 23 15:33:27 PST 2009

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by failsafeDexconf, using
# values from the debconf database and some overrides to use vesa mode.
#
# You should use dexconf or another such tool for creating a "real" xorg.conf
# For example:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen      0  "Default Screen" 0 0   # This may set the default screen, from what I can decipher
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Configured Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Module"  # This section seems to be nVidia specific
    Load           "glx"
    Load           "v4l"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice" # This section is for a US English generic 105 key keyboard, no extra media buttons supported
    Identifier     "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
EndSection

Section "Monitor" # This entire section is monitor specific and should match the specifications for YOUR monitor
    Identifier     "Configured Monitor"
    VendorName     "Generic LCD Display"
    ModelName      "LCD Panel 1280x1024"

                          # Especially change these two lines to match your monitor specifications

    HorizSync       31.5 - 64.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 65.0

                          # My monitor is read properly for gamma, but some displays are not read properly.  This should work,
                          # but may need to be changed to match your display gamma, if you can find specifications.[/color]

    Gamma           1 

    ModeLine       "640x480@60" 25.2 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync
    ModeLine       "800x600@56" 36.0 800 824 896 1024 600 601 603 625 +hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "800x600@60" 40.0 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "1024x768@60" 65.0 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
    ModeLine       "1280x960@60" 102.1 1280 1360 1496 1712 960 961 964 994 -hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "1280x1024@60" 108.0 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync

                   # Note that I do not have a modeline which supports 1920x1080 resolution!  That will have to be added

EndSection

# I have no idea why this section is here.  I have only connected one monitor, ever
Section "Monitor"
 #
    Identifier     "monitor1"
    Gamma           1
EndSection

Section "Device"

         # This section is for your display card.  You will have to change it to match your setup.[/color]

    Identifier     "Configured Video Device"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA"
    BoardName      "NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          0
EndSection

Section "Device"
#
# Again, I don't know why the duplication, I only ever had one display[/color]
#
    Identifier     "device1"
    Driver         "nv"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA"
    BoardName      "NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "Configured Video Device"
    Monitor        "Configured Monitor"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"

       # This entire section is monitor specific and should match the specifications for YOUR monitor
       # Note that the next line must be changed to be larger than your actual display dimensions

        Virtual     1280 1024

        # The next line is the default color depth

        Depth       24

        # The first mode listed on the next line is your default mode unless changed in another area of the file.

        Modes      "1280x1024@60" "1024x768@60" "1280x960@60" "800x600@60" "800x600@56" "640x480@60"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"

# I believe this section may be used to set the default monitor settings, but I haven't experimented.
#
    Identifier     "screen1"
    Device         "device1"
    Monitor        "monitor1"
    DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

I tried to comment the code as well as I know it. Hopefully this will help to answer your questions.

[cwsnyder]

Well, I did some more investigating, including getting an install Live DVD burned for LM14 Cinnamon and this is what I found:

I found that the LM14 desktop was unusable, because at best it had yellow on white lettering and all small icons were totally obscured. I could get a usable display by using the 'nomodeset' kernel option on the GRUB boot menu and I got the menu and desktop shown in most people's screenshots. When I went to change from the default 1024x768 display mode to 1280x1024 native mode for my LCD monitor, I got that 'unable to read gamma from display' error and my xrandr response said my display was connected to 'default', which I have tried before and it locks me out from using xrandr to change my display mode.

I finally found a hint in my search that I may need to change my display driver from the default nouveau driver for my nVidia display system to the proprietary nvidia-current or other nvidia driver. I was able to open a terminal and issued a sudo apt-get install nvidia-current.

This allowed me to change my display resolution to 1280x1024 and gave me a usable display, but the mint menu changed from the pictured 3 section menu to a single section Windows 95 like menu. It looks like everything is there, but I don't know why changing the display driver software changed the menu. Also, I lost all of the quick icons next to the menu except the 'Show Desktop' icon. I don't know if the notifications area changed, but now I have the network manager icon, the volume control speaker icon, and the time display, only, in this area.

For the OP, I recommend trying the proprietary driver for your particular nVidia card, which may be nvidia-current, to try fixing your problem.

[lperg]

For the OP, I recommend trying the proprietary driver for your particular nVidia card, which may be nvidia-current, to try fixing your problem.

Thanks, that did it! It looks like nouveau does not support either the GeForce GT-218 card, or the combination of the card with the Acer H243H monitor. With nvidia-current I get all the resolutions including the native 1920x1080 with no xorg.conf file needed.

As far as I'm concerned, the issue is resolved; we haven't heard yet from tenfoot, the OP, though.

Thanks again!
--LP--

[cwsnyder]

I found another fix for the 'unable to read gamma from display' error. First, select a valid display mode for your display from the xrandr output. We will simply call it <displaymode> for the purposes of this discussion. Open a terminal and enter the following line

Code: Select all

xrandr --output default --gamma 1:1:1 --mode <displaymode>

Almost always, in my experience, the only display shown as 'connected' is going to be 'default', which is the reason I used that in this example. <displaymode> can be 800x600, 1024x768, or some other mode. After entering this --gamma entry, your Display GUI should allow you to select your preferred or native display mode, which may not actually display when it asks if you want to keep this configuration. If you select to keep the configuration and log out, your next login should have that display resolution, as should your desktop when you finish logging in.

[Booster]

Having a similar issue with LM 14.1.

- VMware Player 5.0.1 build-894247.
- VMwareTools-9.2.2-893683.
- Windows 7 Enterprise, 64-bit 6.1.7601, Service Pack 1.

The workaround cwsnyder provided works like a charm but I have to do this after every restart as the added mode "disapears" from the GUI and cannot be set via the CLI.

Code: Select all

iamarobot@robotarmy ~ $ xrandr -s 1920x1080
Size 1920x1080 not found in available modes


Is there a way to make this a persistent change?

Appreciate any help. Can provide more information if you tell me how.

- Booster