Posts Tagged ‘video card driver’

How to configure Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP on Debian and Ubuntu Linux

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

I just had to configure a Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP on a very old computer installed with Xubuntu 12.04. The Graphic card is not automatically detected and Xorg Linux server automatically runs X without generating any config in /etc/X11/xorg.conf after Xubuntu install. By default Linux uses the VESA driver for running X, the problem with VESA is it is very slow in videos and is only good for text reading and simple browsing. For watching video and Youtube, one needs to install the custom Video card driver on this host the Video card was identifying in lpsci as:

user@oldhost:~$ lspci |grep -i matrox
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G200 AGP (rev 03)

In deb package repositories, there is a special xorg MGA driver suited to run MGA cards, thus to use it I had to first install it with:

 

user@oldhost:~# apt-get install --yes xserver-xorg-video-mga
....

For allowing card to normally watch movies – you have to have installed a special video driver which is to be lated built from source:

user@oldhost:~#  apt-get -b source mga-vid-source
user@oldhost:~# dpkg -i /usr/src/modules/mga-vid/debian/mga-vid-source_2.6.32-1_i386.deb
....

There is also special program to test if MGA video driver is installed and work correctly mga_vid_test. To have it installed and use it you have to be running on 2.6.x Linux kernel cause it is a bit of old software plus it is necessary to have installed mga-vid-common i.e.:

user@oldhost:~# apt-get install --yes mga-vid-common
.....

I did a quick research online for other people who faced similar problem and found in Ubuntu Forums the following MGA G200 recommended xorg.conf
Below config was little modified by me as by default it was configured to run in 1280×1024 in 24 bit depth color. Usually 24 bit color is high for old cards, plus the resolution of 1280 seemed quite high for this piece of old iron, so I decided to use the better suiting old computers 1024×768 in 16 bit color depth.

How to fix “Out of Range” resolution problems with NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64/Model 64Pro with BENQ FP61E

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Today I had a task to change an old CRT Monitor to LCD BENQ Model FP61E on a computer running Microsoft Windows XP SP3.

Changing phyiscally the monitors and restarting the computer to load with the new BENQ monitor ended up with the LCD Monitor showing a blank screen with error:

Out of Range

making the computer completely unusable.

Thanksfully in Windows Safe Mode the monitor was able to display the screen properly, so I had an option to operate somehow on the pc

My guess was that the Out of Range monitor problems were caused by an incorrect (monitor unsupported resolution).

Therefore what I tried as a fix to make it work was:

1. Enter Windows Safe Mode and change (lower the resolution) to 640×480, and restart the PC.
Unfortunately using this classical way to fix such issues failed… so I thought of some options.
2. Disable the video card NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64 driver and check if this will make any difference.

I come up with the idea the Out of Range LCD issues might be caused by the Video card driver cause I've noticed in safe mode a standard VESA like VGA Driver shipped with Windows worked just fine.
To Disable the currently loaded NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64/ Model 64Pro I used:

System -> Device Manager -> Hardware (Tab) -> Display Adapters

Clicking on Display Adapters the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64 appears using the option menu on it one can choose to disable the driver.

Further on restart Windows, to test if the XP will load properly with disabled NVidia video drivers.
Onwards it was clear the whole Out of Range issues were caused by some kind of conflict between the LCD BENQ FP61E Monitor and the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64

Often latest video drivers solves hardware incompitability issues and fix many bugs, upgrading the driver to latest is always a good idea.

3. Therefore I Upgraded the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 64 driver (using Safe Mode) to the latest available from Nvidia's official site.

Weirdly Upgrading NVidia Riva TNT2 drivers to the latest did not fix the Out of Range blank screen error.
After a bit of thinking on what to do to make the Monitor work fine with the Nvidia driver, I thought of completely uninstalling the Nvidia drivers and installing them again might be a fix.
In my previous experience with Windows at many occasions, uninstalling a driver failing to properly work and installing it again with a working version was a good fix.

4. Uninstall the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model and Install the latest driver.

Uninstalling and Installing the Video driver had to be done in Windows Safe Mode again, in normal mode the windows was not displaying anything.

After The driver installation program completes the installation it requires a restart. After the restart the Video driver gets loaded fine and Windows loaded up in Normal mode as usual 😉