VESA 1600x1200 Dell Inspiron 8100 Error

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[Astrosynthesist]

Hello forum!

I'm new here, I just successfully installed DSL on a CF card for my old laptops, to try and breathe some linux into them.

It works great on my Toshiba Libretto, but I am struggling with my Inspiron. Essentially, every resolution for X works fine (but doesn't fill the screen) except for the native resolution of 1600x1200 at any color depth, which fills the screen but displays as in the picture below. A "column" of pixels from the left is repeated across the screen and the top half of the vertical pixels make up the whole image top to bottom.

I consider myself to be somewhat of a power user but I can't figure this out at all. All I can say is that it looks like vga modes 797-799 are not installed for GRUB, but honestly I have very little experience troubleshooting graphics and my internet searches turned up nothing to help!

Let me know what you think!

[CNK]

If none of the graphics mode commands are working from the boot command line, you likely have a laptop that requires a non-standard video mode, see this wiki page (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/vga_xxx.html) with a short guide on how to (hopefully) determine the video mode required.

[Astrosynthesist]

I went through that post and the numbers I came up with were unknown to grub and thus failed. It appears as though 1600x1200 is unsupported by dsl out of the box. I'm wondering if there are some files somewhere I can copy to the boot folder to make them known.

Side note: I'm having two more issues (but will be making new threads for them momentarily).
1. I am trying to run a dual partition setup for / and /home, but fstab is not allowing me to mount /home on boot, even though it works after boot.
2. I have a recovery partition containing the livecd and bootdisk, and I need to modify one of the system files so that pcmcia works on boot without hanging, but I can't figure out how to modify the KNOPPIX image itself.

[CNK]

The 1600x1200 resolution is noted on this page though (http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO.html#ss5.3).

perhaps check that the values you entered line up with those there (converted to decimal).

There is the option of using specific video grivers instead of the frame buffer in DSL, but I don't think the drivers for your video chipset are available. Might be worth looking into, I don't have the time to double check.