Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 08:49:00 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: sporkl@dti.net Cc: freebsd questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: X Message-ID: <19971031084900.34751@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971030160139.309A-100000@iconoclastic.com>; from sporkl on Thu, Oct 30, 1997 at 04:16:46PM %2B0000 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971030160139.309A-100000@iconoclastic.com>
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On Thu, Oct 30, 1997 at 04:16:46PM +0000, sporkl wrote: > Hello. > > I got X to start, yippee. You can go "X vtXX", to specify a > virtual terminal to run it on. You can, but that's not the recommended way. > I specifed vt1, which I was looking at at > the time. It scrolled a bunch of text quickly, looked like a series of > things like > > (..)<text> > > The screen went blank for about a milisecond, and then white > flashes of horizontal light started going crazy all over the place and > they would flash out of the center of the screen and then disappear, amid > a strange clicking noise. I thought this looked rather like a > misconfigured monitor, so I shut it off. I rebooted, my monitor worked, > all was good. No X. > > I called the people who sold me the computer, they said that they > included a booklet on my monitor. The previous settings for Hsync and > Vsync came from a web-site unaffiliated with my monitor's manufacturer. I > reconfigured X with new Hsync and Vsync settings, 30-50 and 50-100 Khz > respectively. I tried again, and the same thing happened. I turned it off > again, put the numbers back in to make sure I had not screwed it up, and > it still went bonkers and clicked amid flashing. My monitor handbook has a > little asterick leading from my frequency section to a note at the > bottom of the page, which reads "Requires correct adapter card". I have an > ET4000/W32 VL-BUS, which is what the computer came with, so I hoped my > frequencies were correct. > > Should I not boot the X server on a virtual terminal I am looking > at? No. > Is the flashing normal (I don't think so, but you never know...)? No. > The monitor is non-interlaced SVGA, and it says it has a maximum > resolution of 1024x768 non-interlaced. The sync signals are TTL positive > or negative, and it has never done anything remotely like this in the > past. This is all interesting, but the important questions are the horizontal and vertical sync frequencies. I'd very much doubt that your monitor can handle 100 kHz; I know of almost none which can. The effects you're seeing are probably due to incorrect frequency settings. The good news is that the monitor seems to be rejecting them (that's the flashing: it tries to sync and gives up, which is a whole lot less dangerous than trying to sync and not giving up, which can burn out a monitor). > Of possible interest, on about one out of every ten boot attempts > the monitor screen stays blank and powered-on, but it does not display > anything. I can hear my RAM check going on, and then the floppy reads to > look for a boot disk, but I can't see anything. Not good, but not necessarily bad. > When I reboot the computer manually, everything works fine. Could my > monitor be missing pins in it's connector? Possibly, but it might also have the wrong tube installed, or be installed upside down. In other words: as good as "no". > I will look. Don't bother. > For some reason I don't have <Xroot>/lib/X11/doc, so I can't > read the monitors file. If anybody could, it would be wonderful if > you could tell me if there was an "Arche 214AH autoscan" monitor in > there. It's not there. > Please send any help you can, thank you. The first thing you need to do is find the horizontal frequency of your monitor. Ah, I see I have misinterpreted your data. You mean 30-50 kHz horizontal and 50-100 Hz vertical. That could be possible. Try easing off to 36 kHz maximum horizontal and see what the monitor does. Also start X with (wait for it) startx, no parameters, but redirect all output to a file: $ startx >>startx.log 2>>startx.log Then try to analyse what it says. It may give you the clue. You shouldn't have any frequencies outside your specified range, of course. Greg
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