Laptop screen issue

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Laptop screen issue
started by: KB1LQC

Posted by KB1LQC on Aug. 31 2005,13:44

I got it to boot on a Dell Latitude and it is very bright and there are vertical bars across the screen. THis doesnt happen when it's going through the booting process only after when it goes to the desktop. any ideas?

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Aug. 31 2005,14:33

LCDs have a "native resolution" or a resolution that they were designed to run at. Try to find the native resolution for your laptop and run xsetup.sh to set it.

Posted by Juanito on Sep. 19 2005,09:57

I have the same problem with a Dell Latitude D400 except that desktop is very dim and basically unreadable (but only when booting from USB - when booting from CD or using embedded DSL everything is fine).

I tried running xsetup.sh and changing the resolution to the native resolution (1024x786x24) but nothing happens - maybe because the bootable USB is mounted read only?

I also tried running Xvesa from the DSL toolbox - the only button showing is 640x480x16, if I use this all the application windows disappear off-screen making them unusable and the icons dissapear. Note that when using DSL embedded Xvesa shows 7 different screen options including 1024x786x24

Any ideas on what to try next?

Posted by Juanito on Sep. 30 2005,00:58

Finally - I got the problem fixed.

Apparently the issue (in my case at least) is that the screen uses main memory to display higher resolutions and the DSL graphics module doesn't supply this memory, hence the display problems.

Here's what worked for me booting from USB:

1. Download XFree86.dsl to the USB root directory - make sure the cheat code/parameter "mydsl=sda1" is present in the syslinux.cfg file in the root directory in order to load XFree86 at boot (this was missing from mine).

2. Comment out (put "#" in front of it) the existing command in /home/dsl/.xserverrc and add the line "exec /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp".

3. Copy the configuration file "XF86Config-4" to /etc/X11/ - I used the file from < http://www.syk.se/~fenrus/d400/ > as a starting point and commented out all the references to the synaptics touchpad. I would post my "XF86Config-4" if I had a web site - if anybody has a need, I can cut & paste it in here.

The display now works fine at 1024 x 768 @ 24bit colour. Next task - to load the synaptics driver for the ALPS touchpad...