Gene C. wrote:
OK, I don't have a Dell but I do have a Compaq Presario R3000z laptop
(Athlon64) with a widescreen capable of displaying 1920x1200. I checked the
drivers DVD that came with it and nothing there. I then checked XP itself (I
still have it installed in a shrunken partition) and there are a whole bunch
of .inf files (it looks like thousands and is at least hundreds). There are
eight "monitor" files (monitor, monitor2, monitor3, etc.).
Looking at a couple of there file I see that they cover a number of
manufacturers (monitor.inf includes Compaq and Dell).
These files have a "Copyright by Microsoft" notice in each of them so I am not
If you have a monitor not known to our MonitorsDb database, go
download the "monitor driver" from the manufacturer's website,
and if it is a .zip file, or .exe, explode the file either in
Windows using the appropriate utilities, or in Linux using either
"unzip", "cabextract" or whatnot. Then surf the available files
inside for the ".INF" files.
Open a bug report in bugzilla and attach the relevant file
(or files) to the report as a file attachment. We then take
this file, and run the utility "inf2mondb.py" included in the
hwdata package on it, and paste the results into the
MonitorsDb file in the hwdata package.
Alternatively, you can run inf2mondb.py on the files yourself
and submit the output of the utility as a file attachment
in bugzilla.
In general however, if people just file a "my monitor does not
get detected and is not on the list of monitors to choose from"
in bugzilla, our response is "Attach the .INF file, and we'll
add the monitor(s) to the database", and then we wait for the
reporter or someone else to hunt down the actual files.
Whoever reports the bug is generally expected to find the
required files and attach them. We generally do not search
the internet, download various files and attempt to find the
relevant .INF file, as it is sometimes time consuming, and
we generally do not have the hardware in question.
As long as someone eventually attaches the requested files,
we'll generally update the database however in a future
build.
> sure about the legality of sharing them. However, I would be
surprised if
> the folks at Red Hat don't have XP installed somewhere in their
organization
> so they should be able to find the same files I did.
In general, we are very unlikely to race around the internet
looking for monitor driver files from manufacturers and
digging through them to drag out the .INF files. It's not
really a function of wether XP is available, but more a
function of effective use of manpower resources.
If you're using Windows XP, either the monitor is detected
via DDC and things just work, or Windows wants the CDROM
or floppy disk from the monitor manufacturer, or the name
of a directory on your hard disk where the .INF file or
.exe file from the manufacturer's website has been downloaded
to.
So, in Linux, either the monitor is detected via DDC and
things just work, or you can snarf the .INF off the CD
or floppy disk from the monitor manufacturer, or download
it from their website too. The only difference is that
Windows can directly use the .INF file right away, whereas
it has to currently be used indirectly in Linux, either
by manually running inf2mondb.py yourself and pasting the
results into MonitorsDb, or by submitting it to us in
a bug report.
What I'd like to see in the future, is system-config-display
get enhanced to *directly* parse .INF files. Since manufacturers
already supply them with every piece of hardware, it's easier
to just write utilities to use the existing metadata, than it
is to come up with some custom new Linux format and try to
convince every hardware vendor to add some new file to their
media. That's a future pie-in-the-sky enhancement idea though,
so for now, it's .INF's to bugzilla...
HTH