Gfx woes with Debian 3.1r1 on Itanium

[bgawert]

I have a HP i2000 (Itanium 800MHz/4MB, 2GB RAM, 18GB disk, Quadro2 MXR 32MB AGP gfx card) which is connected to a Dell 2005FPW 20" Widescreen TFT (1680x1050native resolution) via DVI. I want to get used to Linux, so I downloaded the latest Debian installation DVDs (3.1r1 for ia64) and did an installation which went fine so far, even gfx works - at least somehow. The gfx desktop shows up with 1924x768 on my 20" monitor (not upscaled but centered with borders). I started xf86config and tried the Nvidia settings and also included higher resolutions (i.e. 1280x1024) but the desktop still is 1024x768. I also edited the /etc/X11/XF86Conf manually and set the resolution to 1680x1050 (which is the native resolution of my TFT) but still end up with 1024x768 only. I replaced the card with an HP/ATI Radeon 7000 AGP 32MB but with that the X server crashes. Needless to say that both cards are capable of 1680x1050 via DVI (it worked perfectly with Windowsxp 64bit Edition Version 2003).

Besides the resolution problem with the Quadro card I also noticed that the gfx performance isn't great. There doesn't seem to be any 2D/3D acceleration active. I wanted to download the Nvidia drivers for Linux/ia64 but the readme says that they don't work with kernel 2.6 which is what I have.

Anyone has an idea what to do? I should admit that I have no experience with Linux (I have some with HP-UX, though, but there I'm using SAM whenever possible).

Benjamin

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Ideas:
Report the problem and hope Debian fixes it.
Try another distribution.

SEP

[bgawert]

What other Linux distribution does exist for Itanium and isn't way outdated (Redhat 7.2, Suse 7.2, Mandrake 8.1) or hell of expensive (Red Hat Enterprise, SuSE Enterprise)? I liked the Mandrake version best but like the others its very old. Debian and Gentoo are the only ones that are uptodate and free. I also tried Gentoo but they don't have full installation media but only a minimal CD which requires installation over the net (and I couldn't get it to install correctly), so the only one that is left seems to be Debian.

Benjamin

[Bill Thorsteinson]

/var/log/Xfree86.0.log should show the
full startup and how it got the the
resolution it picked.

Multiheaded displays require some additional
configuration in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
file. I don't beleive any of the config
tools handle that automatically.

You may have to work throught the
information given by man XF86Config-4.
It includes an example for a dual headed
display.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

Save your old XF86Config-4 file before
manually editting it. Once you edit it
the Debian configuration tools will leave
it alone as they checksum the file and
won't modify it if you have modified.

The default configuration may not have all
the optimizations enabled.
Check /usr/share/doc/xfree-common for
some more documentation. You
can find lots of documenation under
/usr/share/doc.
To display gzipped files you can use zless.

[bgawert]

Thanks for the answer, I'll check this file. But I don't have multihead displays, it's a single display connected to the DVI port of the gfx card, nothing more. Does it really require to fiddle in the XF86Config-4 to get this to work?

Benjamin

[David Timms]

It seems the Fedora Core 5 distribution will be out within a week ot two. They always try to get as much new stuff into it as possible, so you may have better luck with it. Fedora Core 5 Test3 with updates also seems stable. It uses the modular X11R7 release. I don't know about itanium processors though...