[NBLUG/talk] Setting up X on a secondary video card

[thiessen at sonic.net]

Hi,

2 questions:

(1)  Does your xorg.conf file really read:

         BusID           "PCI:1:13:0"

When "X -scanpci" tells you that the card is at 0:13:0  ?

(2)  I don't know how well the vga driver plays with the TNT2 video card.
     Try the "nv" driver instead.

Justin

> I'm trying to figure out how the X.org configuration is supposed to work.  So
> far I've been doing fairly well, but now I've run into a problem that I can't
> quite figure out.
>
> I can make X work just fine on my primary video card, and now I'm trying to
> set up X to start on a secondary video card (I'm not going to try to make both
> cards work simultaneously...yet).  When I ran "X -scanpci", I got the
> following lines of interest:
>
> (0:0:0) unknown card (0x1043/0x807f) using a VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377
> [KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
> (0:13:0) nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro]
>
> The device at (0:0:0) is my primary video card; an ATI Radeon 9200 in an AGP
> slot.  The device at (0:13:0) is the secondary video card, which I acquired
> used (I'm assuming that the information returned by the scan is accurate).
>
> To set up the xorg.conf file to run the secondary card, I started with the
> working (and safely backed-up) xorg.conf that I had used on the Radeon card,
> and changed the video card definition to:
>
> Section "Device"
>         Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
>         Driver          "vga"
>         BusID           "PCI:1:13:0"
> EndSection
>
> (I used the "vesa" driver because it's supposed to work with just about
> everything; I expect to use a more functional driver once I figure out the
> optimal settings for this video card.)
>
> Since I'm not yet 100% sure of the capabilities of this video card, I also
> dumbed down the "Screen" definition to something I was sure it would support:
>
> Section "Screen"
>         Identifier      "Default Screen"
>         Device          "Generic Video Card"
>         Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
>         DefaultDepth    4
>         SubSection "Display"
>                 Depth           8
>                 Modes           "800x600"
>         EndSubSection
> EndSection
>
> Seems like it should work...but it doesn't.  I get the following output from
> X (unrelated messages are not shown):
>
> (WW) VESA: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0:13:0) found.
> (WW) VESA: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:0) found.
> (EE) No devices detected.
>
> Fatal server error:
> 	No screens found.
>
>
> And this is where I'm stuck.  Any ideas as to what's going wrong?
>
> --
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>
> The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, and
> sometimes three.
> 		-- Alexandre Dumas
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