On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 08:16:32AM -0600, Marc Aurele La France wrote: > > This is a system BIOS issue, a problem particularly common with Dell's > > lobotomised BIOSes. And there's very little the driver can do about it. > > Depending on your kernel, you _might_ be able to get past this point by > > configuring it to use atyfb to drive the Rage Pro. > Would it be practical to teach XFree to let the user lie to it, and > pretend to be the BIOS? I know it would be another config file (or > extension), but this seems a fairly common problem. > Is the problem just that the BIOS won't tell X what it needs to know, > or does it actively get in the way? Such things as video memory timing and the like are VERY adapter-specific, making it quite unrealistic for the driver to perform adapter initialisation. Thus the driver requires that the adapter be previously initialised or have a BIOS available. This is simply a consequence of ATI's adapter design and there's dick-all the driver can do about it. One could, I suppose, boot with the onboard adapter as primary, save its initialised BIOS somewhere, and have int10 use that copy in the multihead situation. But the code to do that (securely or not) just isn't there. Your options, at this point, are to talk to Dell (dead end), give up on the onboard adapter in multihead, replace your motherboard, or get a system that's not so broken. Or, as I suggested above, atyfb _might_ come in handy for a change. Marc. +----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | Marc Aurele La France | work: 1-780-492-9310 | | Computing and Network Services | fax: 1-780-492-1729 | | 352 General Services Building | email: tsi@xxxxxxxxxxx | | University of Alberta +-----------------------------------+ | Edmonton, Alberta | | | T6G 2H1 | Standard disclaimers apply | | CANADA | | +----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ XFree86 developer and VP. ATI driver and X server internals. _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
