[ltp] Re: T61 and xrandr

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:08:32 -0500
Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> dijo:

>> screen. In other words, xrandr had created a wider screen for me.
>> While that is lovely, when I try to do a slide show with Impress it
>> all appears on the main screen, not off to the right.
>
>I'm not sure if your nouveau driver already supports the XRANDR-1.3
>API, but if it does, then you can use the "--primary" option to change
>which display is the "primary", which influences which display will be
>used by Impress.

At the moment my Fedora 13 x86_64 is a bit messed up. In an attempt to
get the projector to display what is on my screen (1680 x 1050) I
installed the nVidia driver. It works great, except that I still
couldn't get projector working correctly. I could get the upper left
1024 x 768 on the wall and my laptop screen still at 1680 x 1050, or I
could get the whole 1680 x 1050 on the wall, albeit scrunched, but then
the laptop screen went to black. 

It's difficult to test things because it takes half an hour to get to
the university, and then I have to impose on the Help Desk staff to let
me into the room.

Since I failed with the nVidia driver I decided to go back to the
nouveau driver and experiment some more with xrandr. It turns out that
going back to the nouveau driver is not trivial either. I remember a few
years ago with Ubuntu I could switch back and forth between nVidia and
the nv driver just by editing the driver line in xorg.conf. Now you're
supposed to run #nvidia-install --uninstall. Except that I don't have
the nvidia-install utility because I installed it with yum from the
rpmfusion repository instead of downloading it and using the shell
script. So instead I uninstalled the packages with Yumex, removed the
blacklist-nouveau file in /etc/modprobe.d/ and removed the xorg.conf
file that the nVidia driver created.

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 tried yum --reinstall kernel, which executed without error, but did
not fix the problem. When I try to boot to the newer kernel something
is calling the nVidia driver and then hanging when it can't find it.

I checked the grub.conf file and the entries for the two kernels above
are identical except for the kernel name. 

I'm stumped why one kernel will start X and the other one hangs.