Dual monitors. blank screen

yjia2 · n00b Joined: 21 Nov 2004 Posts: 19

I have a AGP nvidia geforce2 mx 400 card running on the nvidia driver. It runs fine by itself. Today i added an old PCI S3 Savage4 card, connected another monitor to it, and ran into a peculiar problem.

Once i boot up, Grub loads fine, then after selecting the kernel (2.6.10-gentoo-r7, with reiser4 patch, following the howto in the howto section) the kernel displays the normal messages for a few seconds before the monitor goes into power-saving mode.

Yes I have the drivers for S3, no I don't have rivafb, yes i am using agpart...my framebuffer is 1024x768 at 60 hz i believe.

here is the output for dmesg (the gfx related part anyways):

thepi · Guru Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 352 Location: Tokyo, Japan

At which point does it go into stand-by mode? Which is the last message you can actually see at your monitor?

From first view I'd suggest disabling vesafb, maybe it can't decide which card to use

Which brings me to the point, which card is the stand-by monitor attached to? Can you see anything on the other card at that time? What about X.org (if you even tried that)?

Btw I think there was a post about multiple vga cards in a machine somewhere around here. Use the Search, Luke!

pi~
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yjia2 · n00b Joined: 21 Nov 2004 Posts: 19

It goes by rather fast, i'm assuming the screen blanks when it is supposed to switch from the low resolution to higher resolution during boot up. I really can't see the last message since it goes past rather quickly. The monitor which displays stuff is the primary monitor that all the POST messages, GRUB, etc... is displayed on (this would be the agp card)... before and after it turns off the other monitor remains without a signal.

Now... i really don't know how i'm supposed to start xorg with the screen black... but i shall try that...

tried searching too... don't think anyone has the same problem... but i'll search harder...

edit: there are people who say i should use PCI as primary, but the thing is... my bios config crashes when i try and switch the primary and secondary display...

edit2: if i do startx then the main monitor lights up like nothing's wrong, but when i kill it the monitor turns off again.... how am i supposed to do xconfig if i can't see the prompt? yet to try disabling vesafb... (or whatever it is)