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egghead3

Member

Registered: 2006-07-28

Posts: 10

Nvidia laptop trouble - No DFP-0 (internal) but DFP-1 HDMI works fine

I just purchased a Sony Vaio CW laptop with an nvidia GT230 card. I installed the proprietary nvidia driver and hal and ran startx without providing an xorg.conf. X started but defaulted to the simple vesa driver. I then created a minimal xorg.conf with a device section as shown in the wiki

Section "Device"
   Identifier     "Device0"
   Driver         "nvidia"
   VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Trying to start X created a blank, black screen. I then plugged in an external monitor via the HDMI port, and this monitor worked great with the nvidia driver loading. I was then able to try using the graphical nvidia-settings program to detect the displays. Only the external display was detected on DFP-1. Presumably the laptop display itself is on DFP-0. I tried to force DFP-0 by adding the following line to the device section.

Option   "ConnectedMonitor"   "DFP-0"

Running startx caused a blank, black screen again, however the backlight was on (unlike before).  The external display did not start either (as expected). Looking through the xorg.0.log file indicates that the card is unable to acquire any EDID information about the internal laptop display. Note that the display works fine in console mode and with fallback vesadriver. The windows nvidia driver also works fine.

Any ideas?

Last edited by egghead3 (2009-11-05 12:30:12)

egghead3

Member

Registered: 2006-07-28

Posts: 10

Re: Nvidia laptop trouble - No DFP-0 (internal) but DFP-1 HDMI works fine

I'll update in case anyone else is having this issue. Apparently it is a bug in the current nvidia drivers according to this thread on the nvnews forums.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthr … 482&page=2

Hopefully this will be resolved before I have to decide whether or not to return this laptop.

egghead3

Member

Registered: 2006-07-28

Posts: 10

Re: Nvidia laptop trouble - No DFP-0 (internal) but DFP-1 HDMI works fine

I figured out how to solve this problem by extracting the EDID in windows. The link in the above post (to nvnews) details how to do it.

alessandro_ufms

Member

From: Campo Grande, MS - Brazil

Registered: 2008-06-25

Posts: 153

Re: Nvidia laptop trouble - No DFP-0 (internal) but DFP-1 HDMI works fine

Hello, somebody can say if that bug is fixed? I want to buy this model (vaio CW27FX). Are microphone, wireless and "light-up"/"light-down key" working out-of-box?

Last edited by alessandro_ufms (2010-05-28 14:20:50)