5.3 to 5.4 upgrade - No Video Output

[Visitor789]

Serge,

Can you examine your /etc/X11/sorg.conf file while at runlevel 3, and post the contents of the "Device" section(s) for your video card(s)?

[kg4afy]

Just wanted to add that I'm having the same issue with my Intel (82915G) on my Dell GX280. Also when booting into graphical installation from the 5.4 disk (never had that happen in 5.3 or before). :-)

[Serge]

Hi, here is what that file contains about the video card:

# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config
...
...
...
Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "Intel"
EndSection

I'll see if I can make a "miracle" happen over the week-end. ;-)

Serge


[quote]
Visitor789 wrote:
Serge,

Can you examine your /etc/X11/sorg.conf file while at runlevel 3, and post the contents of the "Device" section(s) for your video card(s)?[/quote] ;-)

[Serge]

UPDATE - I just restored the xorg.conf file from my 5.3 backup and it has the same information as mentioned earlier. So, I have no idea what else to do about this issue.

Ideas and suggestions will be welcome. :-)

Thanks!

Serge

[ntoge]

If you are using a video card with dual output, switching your monitor cable from one to the other might help, since this is what happened to me when I was doing a fresh install of CentOS 5.4 recently. If yours is with a single video output, obviously it won't apply to you and I do not know what the root cause of your problem is.

[Visitor789]

Serge and kg4afy,

As described in my firt post in this thread (#19), I had what appears to be the same problem as yours. I found two ways to get working video, both involving a simple edit of the video card's "Device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. (By the way, sorry for that "sorg" typo in post #21.)

One method is simply to change the Driver entry from "intel" to "i810." That gave me video, but the Xorg log warned that the "intel" driver is preferred.

The second method is to leave the driver entry as "intel" but insert a line to disable DDC. That works for me. The device section for my card reads:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "DDC" "false"
EndSection

I simply added the line setting Option "DDC" "false" and the video is fine.


dg4afy,

I suspect you can get a graphical installation screen by tweaking the boot command line to alter the video parameters somehow. I realize that's no real help.

[kg4afy]

[quote]
Visitor789 wrote:
Serge and kg4afy,

As described in my firt post in this thread (#19), I had what appears to be the same problem as yours. I found two ways to get working video, both involving a simple edit of the video card's "Device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. (By the way, sorry for that "sorg" typo in post #21.)

One method is simply to change the Driver entry from "intel" to "i810." That gave me video, but the Xorg log warned that the "intel" driver is preferred.

The second method is to leave the driver entry as "intel" but insert a line to disable DDC. That works for me. The device section for my card reads:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "DDC" "false"
EndSection

I simply added the line setting Option "DDC" "false" and the video is fine.


dg4afy,

I suspect you can get a graphical installation screen by tweaking the boot command line to alter the video parameters somehow. I realize that's no real help.[/quote]

Thanks for the tip! I added [b]Option "DDC" "false"[/b] and it works wonders now.

[Visitor789]

kg4afy,

I'm glad the fix worked for you. Regarding the issue (probably related) with graphical installation, you might check
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.2/Installation_Guide/ch06s02s01.html

Perhaps using a boot option like driver=i810 would work, assuming that driver is on the installation disk. Alternatively, driver=vesa might help.

[Serge]

I concur that adding the Option "DDC" "false" is the (temp) solution to this problem. After modifying my xorg.conf file with the details below, after reboot, the system came up beautifully! Don't know what happened with the new kernel, but it broke my system as it was working well before. It appears to be stable now.

Thank you again, to everyone, for all ideas and suggestions!! :-)

Serge



Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "DDC" "false"
EndSection

[quote]
Visitor789 wrote:
kg4afy,

I'm glad the fix worked for you. Regarding the issue (probably related) with graphical installation, you might check
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.2/Installation_Guide/ch06s02s01.html

Perhaps using a boot option like driver=i810 would work, assuming that driver is on the installation disk. Alternatively, driver=vesa might help.[/quote]

[Visitor789]

Serge,

Glad you have graphics working. The problem probably arises not in the kernel, but in the "intel" driver or libddc.so in Xorg. It seems that when the driver does a DDC probe of our cards, the X server crashes with a signal 11 and leaves the monitor with no i/o unless you've loaded a frambuffer module. The system itself continues to run normally -- at least in my case, I could still type and execute commands (such as to shutdown or to load a framebuffer module), even if I couldn't see them.