Kirya [.net]

I have purchased a new screen, and I have chosen an Acer AL2002W, mainly because of its low price. It is a 20″ wide screen, with a native resolution of 1680×1050 @60Hz. For now, it seems to be good value for money, and working with this screen is very confortable (I previously used a standard 4:3 17″ screen at 1280×1024).

While configuring Xorg was painless (with both free nv and proprietary nvidia drivers), I still haven’t managed to get the framebuffer working with the native resolution of the screen.

As vesafb doesn’t seem to be able to use a 1680×1050 resolution (hwinfo --framebuffer only gives 4:3 modes), I have tried to patch my kernel with vesafb-tng, which haven’t yield better results.

While nvidiafb allows me to get a 1680×1050 framebuffer, it conflicts with proprietary nvidia driver, preventing it from being loaded. With the free nv driver, I can’t have the display centered both in console and in X (they both use the same mode, and the screen is able to stroe user modes at the condition the new display information habe 1Khz difference for horizontal frequency or 1Hz for vertical frequency or the syn signal polarities are different from the default modes).

By the way, I have noticed that two of my laptops have the same Intel 915 video chipset, and one only is able to have a 1280×800 framebuffer (using the undocumented vga=0x362 code). I can’t understand the reason of this difference.