jolphil Posted February 16, 2015 Share Posted February 16, 2015 Hi all, Recently I have a problem on two Mint 17 cinnamon systems..They were both working fine and I guess after an update(I don't remember which or when) the problems started..Heres what happened as best as I can describe. Suddenly after turning on one morning, my display resolution went from 1680x1050 to something like 1024x768. Thus all Icons and panel went large. I used the 304 Nvidia driver on both systems and the maximum resolution shown was the 1024x768 where as it was 1680x1050 before. After playing around with the Nvidia configuration I noticed that my monitor was listed as unknown.It is a Samsung SyncMaster 220wm capable of the previous resolution. Try as I might, both systems failed to see the monitor..I logged out into Mate and the same thing, unknown monitor. After several hours, I started the driver mgr. and switched to the nouveau driver on both systems and my resolution is back to 1680x1050 with the monitor being re-discovered.Only problem is that most things appear to load slower and the computer is overall slower than the Nvidia driver.The result is now both systems are at 1680x1050 but overall slower.It is livable but I am somewhat dissapointed in performance as it was not a blazer to start with..(old but good) Here is a list of components CPU P4 pentium 3.0GHZ AGP G71 geforce7800 GS 2 GB system memory Samsung 220WM monitor What is the best guess as to what happened? kernel update maybe? Are there any suggestions as to getting back to the working nvidia driver? Thanks all for reading this.. jolphil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 16, 2015 Share Posted February 16, 2015 It sounds like the frequency was misidentified. Try this: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1279 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 16, 2015 Share Posted February 16, 2015 Do not mind the part where it says KDE and LinuxMint 14 in the title as the procedure is the same Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolphil Posted February 17, 2015 Author Share Posted February 17, 2015 Thanks SB, It worked for one system but I think I bungled the second and still have to work it out.. (my vim is rusty as well as most things) :'( jolphil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Thanks SB, It worked for one system but I think I bungled the second and still have to work it out.. (my vim is rusty as well as most things) :'( jolphil I like Vim but why use it if you are rusty>? There are much easier cli editors out there like nano, for instance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolphil Posted February 17, 2015 Author Share Posted February 17, 2015 80 year old brain never used nano..Might take a look at it thanks.. jolphil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 80 year old brain never used nano..Might take a look at it thanks.. jolphil It is very simple to use, as the controls are at the bottom and it should of came preinstalled on Mint. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 Yes nano is quite easy. It's all I've ever used for editing text files in a terminal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolphil Posted February 19, 2015 Author Share Posted February 19, 2015 OK just to update this ..I installed a virgin Mint 17.1 cinnamon on a new Hard drive and went through the process of adding all my packages and in the process learned something new. First, the install defaulted to the nouveau driver at 1680x1050 resolution.OK.In cinnamon when you hover over the menu packages and move the mouse down, instead of selecting and highliting each package it highlites all you hover over and not just the one you end up with.In addition the text at the bottom of the menu is garbled because it superimposed all the highhighlited and tried to show them all. I know this is confusing to explain but it does happen..If you log out and re-log back in with Mate, the menu is different but works perfectly. Again this is with the nouveau driver..It does find my monitor and configures it correctly. If I go to the driver Mgr. and choose the recommended driver the nvidia -304 and install it, you wind up with a 1024x768 display..The nvidia-304 does not find my monitor and shows it as "unknown". If you gksudo kate /etc/path to xorg file and add in the correct frequencies(in my case 81khz and 75 hz) and also put in (samsung electric 22) and save it . You can later in "Display" pick the correct resolution (my 1680x1050)..The cinnamon menu then works perfectly with no problems. Next surprise is that, when I went to install wine for some unknown reason b4 it installed, it notified me that to install, it had to delete the nvidia 304 driver??? Is this why my other two systems lost my display resolution afterwards? And what does wine have to do with the display driver anyway..At least this explains what happened to me and I am not going bonkers..Not yet anyway.. In conclusion this may be due to a bug in this system(nvidia) because it does not show up in my newer AMD CPU system with the AMD video card. I guess I just have legacy components that the newer Linux systems overlooked. Humm possibly time to build another modern computer? Thanks for reading this saga. jolphil 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 Well those issues sounds like they might be related to noveau. Noveau is really buggy because unlike ati, nvidia does not contribute anything to Linux so it has to be completely reverse engineered. That is why Linus famously said screw you to nvidia on camera Basically my point is, that could just be the driver causing all the graphical issues. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolphil Posted February 20, 2015 Author Share Posted February 20, 2015 I give credit to the noveau developers because it was considerably better than the nvidia 304 driver.Noveau is not perfect yet but they are at least working on it.. I have stuck with Nvidia cards for years and years but my future purchases are going to be AMD/ATI. jolphil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 Not sure if this is applicable to you, but I figured I'd share and let you decide if it's related. I had a similar experience with proprietary nVidia and ATI drivers awhile back. I have an older Dell Vostro 400 with an nVidia GeForce8300(?) card, circa 2006. I also have a homebrewed frankenputer with AMD/ATI 4500(?) series APU. I run Ubuntu 12.04 on both, and I was also using proprietary GPU drivers on both machines. About 12-18 months ago, both machines received an update in similar 2-3 month time frames that caused graphics issues. To make a LONG story a short one, and getting to the point, an updated version of X.org (perhaps 1.4.x?) dropped support for older "legacy" GPUs that utilized proprietary drivers. It seems that proprietary drivers were built on older X.org configurations and the updated X.org broke the proprietary code base (that was what I understood it to be). I had always installed proprietary drivers because they were "recommended" by the OS. So my choices were to rollback to the previous version of X.org or to remove proprietary drivers. I'm not a gamer and I'm not a heavy user of GPU cycles, so I figured I'd try the open source ATI and nVidia drivers. Purging the proprietary drivers and installing the native OSS drivers worked for me, and I haven't had issues since, FWIW. Later on, intending to offload some graphics processing from the APU to a dedicated GPU, I found a deal for an ATI Radeon 6450, did some research to ensure X.org supported that series, purchased, installed the card, and watched it automagically get discovered, activated over the onboard APU, and configured by Ubuntu. It was the most pain-free GPU installation I have EVER done, FWIW!!! Even though proprietary ATI drivers are available, I continue to use the OSS drivers with no issues. If I don't need 'em, it's just easier. I share all of this background just so I can say to you: check your version of X.org and see if your version is compatible with your "legacy" card. If it is not, perhaps your longer-term solution is just to pick up a newer $35-$50 video card? P.S. It appears that nVidia has been causing issues similar to yours for quite a while. Perhaps this link may be helpful: http://askubuntu.com/questions/82532/monitor-not-detected-low-resolution-only Alternatively, I found this page, specifically for changing screen resolutions in Mint: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/877 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 @Hedon James: Well you have to remember that AMD works closely with the open source developers so the floss driver is almost on par with the catalyst driver. There have been times in the past where the floss driver outperformed the catalyst driver, especially with multi-monitor setups. http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/open-source/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolphil Posted February 21, 2015 Author Share Posted February 21, 2015 @ Hedon James, Thank you for your post and the background information too. I think you are exactly on point here. I have used this same system with the same components in the past with no problems at all..Only recent versions seem to give trouble. As I pointed out in a previous post my box is old but good. I will look into what you found out about xorg . You looked into it deeper than I did or could. Thats whats good about this forum since the time Bruno was here to the present. My modo is you are never too old to learn.. Thanks again jolphil 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Jolphil I only looked as deep as I had to go to get my main workhorse booting again! LOL! It's been awhile and I didn't document the process for resolution, but I seem to remember booting into recovery mode to verify that it was a graphics driver issue. I can't locate the Ubuntu Wiki page that I referenced, and maybe it's changed, but these two links seem to jog my memory a little. I know you're using Mint, but since Mint is based on Ubuntu, I'm assuming Ubuntu solutions will apply to Mint. Before you do anything though, does your machine have a "brightness" setting? Sorry if that sounds condescending, but I have experienced "boot to black screen" symptoms that turned out to be nothing more than bugs for screen brightness settings...the computer booted just fine, but the brightness was at 0, effectively providing a black screen on a computer that was booting just fine! Once you have eliminated that possibility, try these: To boot into recovery mode and test "failsafex" graphics: http://www.howtogeek.com/196740/how-to-fix-an-ubuntu-system-when-it-wont-boot/ This should confirm whether you have a graphics driver issue or something else. Assuming its a driver issue, this could also be helpful, especially for an nVidia user: http://askubuntu.com/questions/41681/blank-screen-after-installing-nvidia-restricted-driver FWIW, I really do believe you have a proprietary nVidia driver issue. Once you have purged the proprietary driver, Ubuntu/Mint should revert to the default FOSS driver. Then you can determine if the FOSS is acceptable for your legacy card, or whether its time to upgrade to a newer card in your legacy 'puter. Either way, I personally recommend FOSS drivers over proprietary unless there's a specific reason you need proprietary. JMO... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 I don't plan on jumping ship from nVidia any time soon. I've only used them since first using computers. Currently have a GTX 560Ti running with nouveau and having zero issues. I do recall reading that nVidia are helping the nouveau developers to a much greater extent these days. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 22, 2015 Share Posted February 22, 2015 I don't plan on jumping ship from nVidia any time soon. I've only used them since first using computers. Currently have a GTX 560Ti running with nouveau and having zero issues. I do recall reading that nVidia are helping the nouveau developers to a much greater extent these days. Ah cool, I didn't know that :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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