xorg 7.1 and Matrox G200

scottro · 2006-09-03 05:04:48

Firstly, this isn't an Arch problem, it's an xorg problem.

Without going into the history, trying xorg 7.1 on several distros I found that my trusty Matrox G200 in conjunction with a Gateway 15" LCD monitor would give the message input signal out of range.

On most of these distros, changing to an old ATI 128 would enable me to startx, though the results weren't consistent. Arch is the only one where I could use my old xorg.conf, and smoothly startx with the ATI card. On the other ones I tried, I had to play around with Hsync. The published specs are 30-80, but on, say Ubuntu, I had to use 30-62.

So, congrats to the Arch people for making a better working xorg than some others. (This has nothing to do with that Ubuntu problem of an upgrade that broke X--the problem also occurred on every other distro using 7.1.)

However, the mga problem is annoying--I haven't found much while googling about it, so it might be some card/monitor combo, and as I've been able to work around it by swapping the Matrox with the ATI card, I'm not going to put much effort into troubleshooting it. The monitor thing is annoying too, but as it doesn't affect Arch, which is the only distro I use for any real work, I'm not going to invest much time in investigating that. Perhaps as 7.1 becomes more wide spread, there will be more people with a similar problem.

So, I can't call this a bug report, because I'm giving no useful information. Also, it isn't a report that would go to the Arch people, since, as I said, it's definitely an xorg problem.

My main reason for posting is more or less as warning to others with mga cards. (However, I repeat, googling has shown very little, so I suspect that it's the card/monitor combo.)

basilburn · 2006-09-03 07:25:30

I got a similar error on an ATI 7000 VE.

It has happened on 2 monitors so far.

I had to manually specfiy color depth or resolution in the "screen" section of the xorg.conf.

eg.

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card2"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

You could try different combinations in this section and see what happens.

Or do the Ctrl-Alt-NumpadPlus to cycle thru them.

scottro · 2006-09-03 13:57:15

No luck with either method--that is, altering the Display section or cycling through.

However, it's good to see that I'm not the only one with this (or similar issues).

Thanks for the input.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-09-03 05:04:48

xorg 7.1 and Matrox G200

#2 2006-09-03 07:25:30

Re: xorg 7.1 and Matrox G200

#3 2006-09-03 13:57:15

Re: xorg 7.1 and Matrox G200

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