it…out

If you thought fixing ACPI was a pain, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Today, I tackled the fixed frequency monitor in the basement…and won!

So here was the problem: a regular old PC monitor will display at lots of different frequencies, but this one will display at just one. The problem with this is that regular old PC video cards output at whatever frequency they want as long as its convenient with the resolution of the image (or something like that). So when I plug this fixed-frequency monitor into my spare PC, I get mangled screen because the video card thinks it can spit out any frequency it wants. So….

I hooked up a normal monitor and installed Fedora on the PC just fine. I started up sshd and connected from a different machine. I plugged in the fixed-frequency monitor and ran

X -configure

from the ssh session. I started X with the newly-generated config file and it actually worked, sort of. I didn’t know you could start X from a remote terminal session, but I guess you can. Unfortunately, the screen was all garbled. X hadn’t discovered the right frequency. Luckily I had booted Knoppix a few weeks back and written down the frequencies it was using (as reported by xvidtune) since it was actually able to get a usable picture on the screen. Anyway, I edited the X config file form the ssh session, adding the appropriate horizontal and vertical frequency lines, and X worked perfectly.

It’s kind of convenient that Fedora starts up X so early in the boot process. Text-mode doesnt display on this monitor, only X at 1024x768, but since Fedora jumps into X as soon as it can, I can see most of the boot messages. Yeah, boot messages are pretty sweet, I know.