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#1 2009-11-16 11:30:31

whoops
Member
Registered: 2009-03-19
Posts: 891

Intel graphics driver confusion...

Hi!


I'm new to Intel cards and driver and I hope, someone can give me a clue on what I've been doing (at all/wrong) so far...

1) I installed xf86-video-intel & tried xorg autodetect.
=> The screen resolution was a lot too big, resizing windows a pain, everything flickered a bit.

2) I looked into the Xorg logfile and saw it has been detecting and activating various things like DRI, calculating the video memory  etc - and for some reason it was looking for xf86-video-vesa & xf86-video-fbdev & complaining about it not being found, which is why I installed those two.
=> Now, after starting X the screen just locked, the Monitor turned off and the Keyboard didn't work to switch back to TTY any more either (so I removed the two drivers again)

3) After the reboot & "fix", I tried changing the screen resolution with xrandr.
=> The resolution seemed to change correctly, but the screen was moving / "rolling" horizontally with a high speed (think old TV's / wrong frequency). Upen moving the mouse, I was surprised again: moving it up and down made a black bar go up and down (could see whole screen if I had the mouse in the bottom, only black when in the top of the screen) and the further right the pointer was, the faster the screen was scrolling trough. Everything looked fine with the mouse pointer in the lower left corner, moving it even a pixel made the screen start to "roll out of the monitor" gently.

4) I generated a xorg.xonf with "Xorg -configure" and added some "strange stuff" (mostly from the compiz wiki entry - I don't use compiz, but in my experience if you configure it to run compiz, everything runs, so this was worth a try wink). Activating compositing, changing colours to 24bit and some settings I'm not familiar with.
=> now everything was smooth & big. For some reason I had a max. possible resolution of something around 1200x[...], but that was fine. Could have just left it like this, but didn't feel like I was "done" yet (also the system froze when I tried to start alsa, which before didn't happen).

5) I tried activating something which I understand is called "KMS", because I read somewhere that this might be a good idea. Put "stuff" into modprobe.conf, edit mkinitcpio.conf, rewrite.
=> after a reboot, I had a nice big resolution in TTY, but Xorg didn't start. The monitor turned off and the machine locked, keyboard and mouse doing nothing.

6) Deleted the xorg.conf which was working before:
=> Juppie, back to (1), just with bigger tty resolution too.


Now, I somehow don't manage to put the pieces together in my brain - what did I do, what happened? And what next....? Any clues? I'm not sure how it's supposed to be, so I don't realy know where I'm going. And stuff. Should I use KMS, should I try intel-legacy, how do I know that and where can I find available options (Xorg) that are NOT obsolete? Like I read "Current Intel drivers no longer support XAA. Try UXA instead (modeline should be activated from boot though)" which is "nice", but where's the more basic "manual" if I don't know how to do that whether if I even want it?


Thanks!

Last edited by whoops (2009-11-16 11:31:39)

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#2 2009-11-16 12:00:16

MadTux
Member
Registered: 2009-09-20
Posts: 553

Re: Intel graphics driver confusion...

Hope you read the Beginners' Guide about setting up X:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide

Then there is a specific guide about Intel cards, which also contains information about KMS:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics

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#3 2009-11-16 12:00:27

eldragon
Member
From: Buenos Aires
Registered: 2008-11-18
Posts: 1,029

Re: Intel graphics driver confusion...

your best shot would be to actually post the xorg.0.log and if you trap it within code tags better wink

one thing to try is to remove all xf86-video-* except for xf86-video-intel

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