[ltp] Re: T61 and xrandr

John Jason Jordan linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:52:50 -0800


On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:28:18 -0800
John Jason Jordan <johnxj@comcast.net> dijo:

>I am back to the nouveau driver and all is well, except that I can only
>boot to the previous kernel in the Grub menu. That is, my Grub menu
>lists:
>
>2.6.34.7-61.fc13.x86_64
>2.6.33.3-85.fc13.x86_64
>
>If I try to boot to the newer kernel the boot process hangs when it
>tries to start X. X does start and run fine if I boot to the older
>kernel, which is what is running as I write this. And it is using the
>nouveau driver.

I finally fixed the problem with booting to the new kernel. It turns
out that merely renaming the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau file
that the nVidia installation created was not enough. I even added a #
to the line inside the file, but something was still accessing it.
Finally I nuked it completely. 

I was booted to the new kernel and X would not start, but Ctrl-Alt-F2
would get me to a command line. Using startx and reading the error
messages is what finally clued me to the fact that you must completely
nuke the blacklist file.

And even then X wouldn't start. It complained that it couldn't find any
screens. But it also said it was using xorg.conf, even though I had
renamed the one created by nVidia. I discovered that something had
created a new one. It was clean and simple and said to use the nouveau
driver. Nevertheless, I knew the nouveau driver doesn't need am
xorg.conf file, so I renamed it. Thereafter X started.

Now I can go back to the university and play with xrandr. That will
have to wait until Monday, though. Meantime I can read up on xrandr so
that hopefully I can get it to work.