[issue854] On ThinkPad T40: X display rather difficult to read if started the first time

[Michael Prokop]

Michael Prokop <mika at grml.org> added the comment:

* Christoph Biedl wrote in grml's BTS on 20100523 / 00:48:

> booting grml 2010.04 on an ThinkPad T40 notebook I noticed the display
> of the X server is hard to read: Pale, poor contrast.  When trying to
> debug it turns out this happens always after the first time X was
> started.  Bringing it down and starting again yields the expected
> behaviour.

> For me, this is not critical at all as I use the graphical mode of
> grml rather seldom.  It might be of interest for other, hence this
> report.

Thanks, highly appreciated.

> Some facts:
> * grml was booted both from the CD-ROM and via USB
> * It doesn't matter whether X was started via the "x" in the menu at
>   the end of the boot process; or using grml-x.
> * The card is a:

> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
>         Subsystem: IBM ThinkPad T42 2373-4WU
>         Flags: bus master, stepping, fast Back2Back, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 66, IRQ 11
>         Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
>         I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
>         Memory at c0100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
>         [virtual] Expansion ROM at c0120000 [disabled] [size=128K]
>         Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
>         Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
>         Kernel driver in use: radeonfb

> * You had suggested "i915.modeset=0" or "nomodeset".  Well, this isn't
>   an Intel card, the latter did not change anything.

Ah ok. Then it should be "radeon.modeset=0" for your system.

Another thing that *might* be worth a try:

* boot Grml
* invoke "X -configure" as root and place the resulting xorg.conf
  file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf
* invoke either grml-x (without the -force option :)) or
  /usr/bin/startx as user grml so the new xorg.conf will be taken

This should provide a X.org configuration that's suggested directly
by the X.org server instead of grml-x.

thanks && regards,
-mika-

----------
messages: 3183, 3184
nosy: grml.fksi
status: chatting
title: On ThinkPad T40: X display rather difficult to read if started the first time

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