Care to dip your fingers in some EDID? [solved]

[petty123]

This message describes the happy conclusion of an EDID problem, after two weeks of agonizing and frantic searches on the net, and after testing countless fixes.

First of all what kind of animal is this EDID? Is a 128 byte message sent by your monitor to your video card on start-up. The monitor informs the video card of its name and its capabilities.

I have two identical Acer 24” LCD monitors (such pieces of crap!) side-by-side. They worked OK for over a year until one broke down. After sending it back to Acer twice ($45 shipping fee each time) finally the main board got replaced and works now ok.

About 3 weeks ago the second monitor started acting up… in Linux it would not go on any higher resolution than 640x480, although in Windows it had no problems. On closer examination, the log showed that the EDID from second monitor was not available.

To make a long story short…it was no way to fix the EDID unless I would RMA it back to Acer. And I was sick of that. So what did I do?

I got firstly a copy of the EDID message from the first monitor, by using the option in “nvidia-settings”. Most likely there is a similar option for ATI cards.

Secondly I altered the xorg.conf to ignore the native EDID and to use my custom made EDID from a file.

Here is a copy of the relevant portions of xorg.conf: