Re: X: set resolution in Squeeze on a Macbook

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Liam O'Toole <liam.p.otoole@gmail.com> writes:

> I have the same graphics card (down to the revision number) as the OP,
> and find that it works in squeeze both with and without KMS. The comsole
> appearance and behaviour is different, of course.
>
>> ¹ http://wiki.debian.org/KernelModesetting
>
> That page mentions some known bugs for the card, but a consistently
> reliable workaround doesn't seem to be available. Fortunately I haven't
> encountered those bugs as yet.

OK, now I'm *really* confused.

Last night, I started experiencing problems with the touchpad: the mouse
cursor wasn't really responding anymore; X seemed to be interpreting all
movements as scroll events, and I couldn't move the cursor in any
direction except sporadically.

So rather than hibernating, as I usually do, I shut the machine down.

This morning, my first boot attempt resulted in a blank screen.  That
is, I wasn't even getting a console. (X does not start at boot.)

So I tried booting with acpi=off, as I have seen a number of sources
that say this helps X-related problems on the Macbook go away.  The
result was: no change in mouse; no change in the graphics resolution;
but really slow keyboard interaction (at the console and in X).  To fix
the mouse, I tried unloading and then reloading the appletouch module,
which actually did help a bit, but didn't bring the mouse back to its
normal functionality.

Rebooted again (without acpi=off).  Now I'm in X at native resolution,
for the first time since installing Squeeze.  Mouse works beautifully.
/var/log/Xorg.0.log shows that I am at last using the intel driver.  The
only line before the driver initialization that I can see is different
from previous attempts is:

(WW) Falling back to old probe method for vesa

...So should I just hope it lasts? :)

Richard