I’ve spent some time recently tweaking kate’s laptop’s X configuration.

The display is an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY, using a Synaptics TouchPad.

The system is currently running Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.16 (r12) and X.org 7.0.

The major changes to the configuration have been due to an upgrade to Xorg 7.0, the fact that the nipple (Trackpoint) was not working under the previous configuration, and a general clean up.

Xorg.conf

Here is an X.org configuration file for a Dell Latitude C610 Laptop using an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY video card. This configuration uses the stock standard X.org ATI driver, however an upgrade to the ATI closed-source driver shortly is anticipated. It’s running on kate’s laptop.

Download atiradeon_mobility_m6.txt

Update: The configuration file has been updated and can be found here.

I promised in a recent article to publish my “struggle” getting NVidia GeForce2 MX400+ TV Output working on my X setup, however there was no struggle, it ended up being a rather simple exersize.

First, before doing any of this, you must be running the closed-source “nvidia” GLX driver (not the open-source “nv” driver), details on this can be found here.

To add TV-Out support, a couple of lines of configuration change are needed to define two completely seperate Layout’s, one for TV-Out the other for CRT Out (this was when I implemented it a few days ago going to be a transient configuration, however I got so attached to having a loungeroom PC again, and missed my work PC so much that I had to dedicate a lounge room PC, more on that project soon!)

I’m in Australia, so the first thing to make sure that I have set is my TV Standard:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "geforce2tv"
  Driver      "nvidia"
  VendorName  "nVidia Corporation"
  BoardName   "NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400]"
  BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
  Option      "TVStandard"            "PAL-B"
  Option      "ConnectedMonitor"    "TV"
  Option      "TVOutFormat"          "SVIDEO"
EndSection

The section for my Television was defined as:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "TV"
  VendorName   "TV"
  ModelName    "TV"
  HorizSync    30-50
  VertRefresh  60
EndSection

Second last, we have the “Screen” definition:

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "tv"
  Device     "geforce2tv"
  Monitor    "TV"
  DefaultColorDepth 24
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth     24
    Modes     "800x600" "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

And one last one being the appropriate Server Layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier     "tvout"
  Screen          0  "tv"         0 0
  InputDevice    "Mouse"          "CorePointer"
  InputDevice    "Keyboard"       "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

It worked remarkably well, and I had no issues using it for watching movies, surfing the net (and even emailling occasionally over the weekend).

Getting the NVidia GeForce2 MX440 video card to work successfully with GLX on Gentoo Linux wasn’t as difficult as first seemed, however there were a few hurdles I ran into.

You will need the kernel and X packages emerged (you can grab the settings package as well if you like). The glx package in Gentoo requires the kernel package, so all you need to do is emerge the nvidia-glx package.

This resulted in the following packages being emerged from portage:

• media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629-r4
• media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629-r6

I then edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and simply changed the driver to nvidia (from nv), however this caused major issues when X next restarted.

I continued playing with various settings for a while and eventually found running startx would work but xdm would fail miserably when starting (causing screen flashing and putting the machine in a state that only a hard reset would fix!!)

My full XOrg.conf file.

The important points with configuration are:

• Turn off dri support
• Keep your initial configuration simple (my struggle with TV out will come soon!)