Re: What part of X causes major display problems?

["Seneca Cunningham" <seneca@slemish.com>]

ben <benfoley@rcn.com> wrote:
> On Monday 14 January 2002 04:56 pm, Seneca Cunningham wrote:
> > The X3 xf86config program says _not_ to probe clocks, but
> > X4 looks like it is probing clocks.
> >
> my understanding of clock probing is that the card is either physically
> capable of standing the probe or it isn't, and that probing a card that
isn't
> capable can actually cause damage. i missed the start of this thread so i
> don't know what kind of hardware you've got. did x ever run in this

Well, I have an old pentium 100, a 640x480 monitor, 16M RAM, 2G harddrive, a
Chips & Technologies 65545 video chip and 1M video RAM. Not much, but it
works (except when it doesn't).

> environment in any version? x4 should make use of any config file
generated
> to run under x3, and you should keep in mind that a blank screen doesn't

I tried my old X3 config file, and X4 couldn't parse it... the logfile says:

	Parse warning on line 43 of section Keyboard in file XF86Config.bak
		Ignoring obsolete keyword "LeftAlt".
	Parse error on line 43 of section Keyboard in file XF86Config.bak
		"Meta" is not a valid keyword in this section.
	(EE) Problem parsing the config file
	(EE) Error from xf86HandleConfigFile()

	Fatal server error:
	no screens found

The file that caused this problem is my X3 config file that worked properly
with X3.

> necessarily mean that x isn't running--just that it's not running the way
> that you want it to.

I had noticed, I could do stuff in X, I just couldn't see what I was doing,
all I could see was narrow vertical lines, or a black screen with a random
smattering of white pixels.

> do you have all the necessary specs for your hardware? i'm one of those
that

No, I don't have all the specs for my hardware. The manual for the entire
system doesn't have the specs beyond the type and size of 4 different
monitor possibilities. And yes, the manual is the _only_ one for the system,
and it is for everything that can be manualised in it, from the mouse to the
monitor. (I hate
pre-packaged-commercially-available-from-an-office-store-near-you computers,
but in the case of some of my systems, they're all that land on my doorstep)

> you are probably close to hating who's never had any problems with running
x.

I'm still deciding who to hate, the people like you, or the people who
decide that a system should only have one _tiny_ manual, most of which is
the instructions for installing the sound and mouse drivers on various
windoze versions.

> consequently, i know jack about it. all i've ever had to do is run
> xf86config, enter the relevant specs, and run it. which xserver are you
> running?

By way of xservers, I have xserver-xfree86 version 4.1.0-11.

Just as I was checking various logs, I realised why there were two different
sets of pixel clock info...

	(--) CHIPS(0): Clocks scaled by 2

This was a line that I had missed in the 5.500MHz-28.000MHz log.

Thanks for any help,

Seneca
seneca@slemish.com