The Horror in the Dell -- the Sequel
2003-04-03 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearAs some of you may recall, I've been having trouble with my computer at work, mainly because Dell sells hardware they don't know how to support.
Well, I finally fixed my video driver problem: turned out that disabling the direct video (DVI) option fixes the problem and allows me to switch virtual terminals. 3D performance will, of course, suck, but I'm doing software development on that machine, not playing games.
I vaguely remembered seeing a bugzilla report -- on a different card -- where disabling DVI fixed the problem. I also recall that I used to have an almost identical problem on my home machine, except that it only showed up after running TuxRacer. It cleared up after I upgraded, so I thought it was the new drivers that solved it, but it may just have been the fact that the new drivers wouldn't enable DVI at the resolution I use because there wasn't enough video RAM for double buffering.
So my best guess at this point is that DVI and VT-switching are somehow incompatible, and that this bug has been in XFree86 for a long time. No way I'm going to convince anybody of that, however. Both RedHat and Dell have made it clear that it's not their problem.
The reason I'm investigating this now is that we're done with our major reports, demos, and presentations for the season. Also, I had just downloaded the ISOs for RedHat 9, and found out that I had to reboot in order to tell the kernel that I had a CD burner (by adding
So now the next problem is figuring out why the RedHat 9 install CD locks up, or at least ignores the keyboard, after it boots. My guess is that it somehow thinks I'm using a USB keyboard.
Well, I finally fixed my video driver problem: turned out that disabling the direct video (DVI) option fixes the problem and allows me to switch virtual terminals. 3D performance will, of course, suck, but I'm doing software development on that machine, not playing games.
I vaguely remembered seeing a bugzilla report -- on a different card -- where disabling DVI fixed the problem. I also recall that I used to have an almost identical problem on my home machine, except that it only showed up after running TuxRacer. It cleared up after I upgraded, so I thought it was the new drivers that solved it, but it may just have been the fact that the new drivers wouldn't enable DVI at the resolution I use because there wasn't enough video RAM for double buffering.
So my best guess at this point is that DVI and VT-switching are somehow incompatible, and that this bug has been in XFree86 for a long time. No way I'm going to convince anybody of that, however. Both RedHat and Dell have made it clear that it's not their problem.
The reason I'm investigating this now is that we're done with our major reports, demos, and presentations for the season. Also, I had just downloaded the ISOs for RedHat 9, and found out that I had to reboot in order to tell the kernel that I had a CD burner (by adding
hdc=ide-scsi to the kernel command line). Wouldn't have been necessary if I'd been able to work with the RedHat 8 that Dell shipped, but I upgraded to 7.3 after a week of struggle in order to get some work done.So now the next problem is figuring out why the RedHat 9 install CD locks up, or at least ignores the keyboard, after it boots. My guess is that it somehow thinks I'm using a USB keyboard.
