New Monitor Cable Confounds Fedora

[sonoran]

A week ago I bought a new ViewSonic monitor, VA926 19" digital. It came with a vga cable, which I used until today without problems. My Matrox video card has a dvi output, and I've read that dvi-to-dvi produces a better display, so today I went to Fry's and bought a dvi cable.

My Arch Linux installation runs fine - and it is a beautiful display - but when I try to boot Fedora 13, after all the scrolling boot text my monitor goes blank and after a few seconds I get an "Out of Range" message from the monitor.

I can get a somewhat useable display by going through a few "Ctrl+Alt+(numeric keypad)-" cycles, and using System/Preferences/Monitor I managed to set it to 800x600, but trying for 1280x1024, the monitor's native resolution, brings up the same "Out of Range" message on the monitor (at least it doesn't burn anything out).

My Xorg log shows this:
[ 21.837] RANDR failure: 8 (extension base 162)
[ 21.837] 021bb920 021bb924 021bb928 021bb92c
...snip about 100 similar lines...
[ 227.650] (II) Power Button: Close
[ 227.660] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
[ 227.660] (II) Power Button: Close
[ 227.660] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
[ 227.660] (II) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Close
[ 227.660] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
[ 227.660] (II) PS/2 Logitech Mouse: Close
[ 227.660] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
[ 227.660] (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Close
[ 227.660] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
[ 227.699] (II) MGA(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
[ 227.699] (II) MGA(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0x2b7ff000 at 0x7f2cf0bed000
[ 227.699] (II) MGA(0): [drm] Closed DRM master.

When I compare the working Arch Xorg log to the failing Fedora log I don't see any difference - both are using the same exact modeline "1280x1024" with the same timings they get from EDID.

Just to satisfy myself that the problem lies in Fedora, I reattached the vga cable and indeed Fedora runs fine with it. Does anyone have any idea what could be going on here?

(I tried the magical "nomodeset" with no change)

[sonoran]

Solved by adding this section to the xorg.conf:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "RandR" "false"
EndSection

This does not explain how Arch manages to work properly with RandR enabled.:confused:

[bob]

Funny. Swapped monitors and went from vga to dvi a couple of months ago. Booted perfectly and never had a glitch.

[sonoran]

Definitely weird. I suspect it is gnome or gdm-related, because the only real difference between my Arch and Fedora systems is that I use Openbox by itself in Arch, gno gnome. :rolleyes:

I really like the digital display, easy on the eyes for us geezers.

[droidhacker]

Matrox.... seriously?

I don't think that there are very many eyes looking at the matrox code, which would probably explain any kind of bugginess that yo might experience.

DVI initialization routines also tend to be much more complex than analog VGA... mainly because you need to check the DDC results to detect if it is, in fact, DVI, or if it is actually VGA anyway.

[Dan]

New Monitor Cable Confounds Fedora ... You've been writing headlines too long. <..:p..>

[sonoran]

Matrox.... seriously?

Very seriously. Matrox cards put out a very high quality signal, which results in a sharper display, particularly on 2D stuff like text. I think they have pretty much abandoned the consumer market, but they still have dedicated fans.
During the 1990s, Matrox Millennium line of video cards were noted for their exceptional 2D speed and visual quality. They had a wide following among users willing to pay for a higher quality and sharper display. --Wikipedia

I don't know whether, technically, that remains true for digital displays, but I sure like the results on my new monitor - dazzling.

The problem was that the mga driver worked fine in Arch, so something besides the driver had to be messing it up in Fedora. I came across a bunch of odd gdm error messages while I was looking through the Fedora logs - although now that everything is working I'm not real motivated to go back and see what they were about.

@Dan: Yup, it's in the blood, I'm afraid. :D

Forgot to mention the greatest advantage of the Matrox G550 - I have absolutely no nvidia or ati driver problems, which must account for at least 33% of the threads on the Forum.