[clug] Video card

Eyal Lebedinsky eyal at eyal.emu.id.au
Sat Nov 8 05:12:46 MST 2014


On 08/11/14 22:45, Bryan Kilgallin wrote:
> Thanks for your advice last night, Eyal:
>
>> Are you saying that you had your original video card plugged (or is it on-board?) as well as the Matrox?
>
> The motherboard has on-board a VGA display port. That recognises the Lenovo monitor that I have plugged into it. But that is with the computer back in its original configuration (no extension cards).
>
> Whereas I tried out the cards one at a time. And as you had suggested, I had various monitors plugged into every available video port! So at most I had three monitors on the table, all of which were plugged into (VGA or DVI) ports on the computer.
>
>> And you had monitors connected to the other sockets which stayed blank?
>
> Always the display featured on a monitor plugged into what I assume was a card of higher specification (like DVI) than the on-board VGA port. Except for the test of one card--which resulted in no monitor displaying!
>
>> And you booted the system like this?
>
> Yes: as I recall, later on in my testing I had set BIOS to "On-board" rather than "Auto".
>
>> What does the GUI configuration app (display settings whatever) list?
>
> Only when only the on-board video port was used, did Ubuntu's Screen Display window correctly identify the monitor brand (and size). Whereas in all instances where the display was via an extension graphics card--Screen Display said that only a laptop was the display. Never were more than one display indicated--despite in some tests all three monitors being plugged in. That was a VGA CRT attached to the on-board port, and two LCD monitors, attached to the ports of a graphics card.
>
>> X interrogates any attached monitors and usually configures it automatically, and I do not recall a case
>> where I needed to "download" a driver.
>
> Perhaps I did not understand how to configure the BIOS?
>
> Today I bought and tried out two DVI cables. So I tested the LCD monitors with both VGA and DVI ports on the various graphics cards.
>
> A friend who helped me lug monitors around, reckoned that my computer setup was archaic! But then, he's a video game addict. And I have not spent money on my computer system than he has on his.

Linux usually does not care much for BIOS. X is supposed to find the attached cards/monitors and  bring them up.

First thing to do is look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if X is complaining about stuff.
Does it even mention the other cards?

Any chance that you actually have a private /etc/X11/xorg.conf? You can try to rename it away and see if X does better.
You can always boot into single-user and rename it back if this end up worse.

Finally, while your computer in ancient, I hope that your distro is reasonably current (from the last few years).

cheers

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au)


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