strange error in X on Dell C840

[bedbug]

Hi all and thanks for a great forum with lots of help for an unexperienced linux user.

However I´ve got a problem that I have never experienced before and cannot seem to solve.

I wiped my Dell Latitude C840 from earlier installation (2.something) and installed 2.6.19-r5. Everything went fine until I Installed X11.

When I start X or kde I get a "bar" a few centimeters from the bottom edge of the screen and under this the screen starts over again. Same thing with the right edge of the screen but here I get a few centimeters of "graphics junk" in the form of various colored vertical lines.

Kde works fine otherwise and I can change reolutions up to 1600X1200. But it seems my gentoo thinks my screen is smaller than it is.

I´ve been running earlier distros on the same machine without any problems with the screen.

Now I´m lost. Any ideas?

[dch24]

Hi bedbug, I think your /etc/X11/xorg.conf may be set up wrong.

I haven't searched extensively, but the first thing I'd do is ask you for the output of this command:

[bedbug]

I wonder. I seem to have made every possible tweak in xorg.conf including setting screen size explicitly. I also copied a few xorg.conf for the exact same layout (gentoo, Dell Lat C840) that i found on the net. With no change in behaviour.

I ran an earlier version (pre 2.4) before and that one worked w/o problems. All this makes me woder if maybe my hardware has got some problem with the new drivers. Or can there be some setting lower down in the software stack that overrides the settings in xorg.conf?

However, I wiped the installation and did it all over again. Haven´t installed X yet but now I have a similar situation where I have a centered screen wich doesn´t fill up the physical screen. Can still change resolutions OK.

I´ll get on with installing X and will report back later with results from the lspci-n.

Thanks

/bedbug

[bedbug]

...easy, but puzzling.

If i use driver "nv" instead of "nvidia" in xorg.conf it all works fine. Just like it used to do. I guess that "nv" might be the free drivers and "nvidia" is Nvidias own?

Why wouldn´t nvidia work? My card, the geforce 440 Go, is on the list of compatible cards?

However, is there any further implications from using nv instead of nvidia? Everything seems to be OK and KDE is up and running at 1600x1200.