On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Marc Joliet <mar...@gmx.de> wrote: > Am Thu, 26 May 2011 16:28:46 -0700 > schrieb "Kevin O'Gorman" <kogor...@gmail.com>: > > > It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a > > little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. > > > > A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could > no > > longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in > via > > SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first > > deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. > > > > Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, > and > > the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever > it's > > trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, > and I > > can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the > > motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe > > support got dropped. > [...] > > (I realise your decision is made, but if this is the bug I think it is, > this > has nothing to do with Gentoo in particular.) > > I wonder which kernel version you use, because in 2.6.36/37 I was hit by a > nasty > EDID parsing bug. Actually, IIRC the code for parsing EDIDs was updated to > understand more features or something, and that triggered errors that > didn't > come up before because those parts of the response from the monitor were > simply > ignored until then (or something like that). This lead to my own monitor > not > responding for over a minute at a time (sometimes going blank in between) > and > other people complained that it left theirs permanently blank. > > I think this is the original bug: > > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31943 > > which contains a workaround (with patch): > > "The drm EDID checker is pretty strict about what EDIDs it will accept. > Try > this patch and add drm.edid_strict=0 to your kernel command line." > > For me, upgrading to 2.6.38 helped, I don't see the problem anymore (though > other people report otherwise). > > *If* this is the bug, it makes me wonder why you don't see it under Ubuntu. > > Good luck with Ubuntu! > > Thanks. It's up, its 2.5.38 which may explain a little. I ported my usual selections (think "world") from my laptops, downloaded and installed around 1400 packages in a bit over 5 hours. This included both libreoffice (the default) and openoffice (from the selections), apache, gimp, on and on, and would surely have taken a week or so under Gentoo.
Today, I port over my apache configuration and my embarrassing downtime is ended. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
