New Monitor Kills My Kernel?!

bobber205 · Guru Joined: 23 Aug 2006 Posts: 561 Location: Oregon

I had to replace my dell monitor with an older version.

As soon as I try to boot up, I load my kernel and after it starts some what looks like video related things, my screen goes completely black and now nothing is shown. My monitor goes into "idle" mode.

Now what? I can chroot in ok and everythin via the livecd, but I have NO IDEA what to do!

jbo5112 · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2005 Posts: 19

Your video card is probably putting out a signal that the monitor can't handle. Either it's trying to run at a resolution the monitor can't run or using a refresh rate that is too fast. You'll have to edit your xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) to change it. If you look for "HorizSync", "VertRefresh" and "Modes" you should be able to find everything. You should be able to find the correct settings somewhere online, and there's probably an example xorg.conf in the same directory that is well commented to help. Your xorg.conf file could even have the comments too. There are also program(s) to configure automatically write your xorg.conf, but I don't know what they are or how they work.

bobber205 · Guru Joined: 23 Aug 2006 Posts: 561 Location: Oregon

It's not xorg. At least right now.

I disabled Xorg from starting up on bootup.

My kernel will boot up for about 20 lines, they the screen will go blank right at the time the text would usually get smaller.

Ehnvis · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 305 Location: /dev/random

Sound like you've setup your framebuffer to use some strange mode that the new monitor cant handle, thats why the screen goes black.

If your using vesa-tng check in the kernel config what you've setup and change or check the grub.conf if you've set it up there.
_________________
HP NC 4010, Pentium-M 725 1.6GHz w/ 1Gb RAM, 60Gb Hitachi Travelstar.
Running Gentoo-2.6.21-r4 (again as 2.6.22 kernels hogs CPU), all but SD reader works fine.