Re: nVidia GeoForce4 with external CRT

[Allan Metts <ametts2 mindspring com>]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the suggestion -- unfortunately, it looks like my situation is a 
little different.  I'm booting into runlevel 3 -- and text-mode screens 
work without a hitch on both the LCD and CRT.  Now that I'm doing this, I 
can startx -- and at least get a good display on the laptop.  But the 
external CRT goes scrambled at this point.

Interestingly enough, dropping back out of X restores the CRT just fine to 
text mode -- but the *laptop* display goes nuts.  Cycling through the 
internal/external display options with the Fn-F8 key combination gets me 
back to good screens on both displays.

But I still don't have XWindows on my big monitor, which is what I need 
when I'm in the office.  Anyone have any suggestions for me?

Thanks in advance,

Allan



At 11:17 AM 11/17/2003, you wrote:
> On Monday 17 November 2003 16:08, Allan Metts wrote:
>
> > I have a laptop booting Fedora with a nVideo GeoForce4 440.  The machine
> > boots up into X just fine, and everything looks great -- UNTIL I try to
> > send video to an external CRT.   Then both the external CRT and the
> > laptop's LCD become totally scrambled.
> >
> > I've tried changing the defined monitor settings to match my CRT model, and
> > I've tried booting with the external CRT enabled.  No dice.
> >
> > Can someone put me on the right trail to get this fixed?
>
> Does your laptop have a Fn-key combo to swap between the main LCD and 
> external
> VGA?  On my Inspiron 5150 I despaired of getting Twinview to work, due to
> very strange artefacts on the VGA port video only (as if the pixel clock was
> being modulated).  However, I found that if I did Fn-F8 at boot-time, before
> the grub screen, then the BIOS correctly inited the second head, and twinview
> works great after that.  So I would try that and see if there are any updated
> laptop BIOSes about.