Problem with resolution changes under Xwindows

[acid_zebra]

Hey all,

I am running a vanilla Mandrake 9.0 with X4.2.1 and the latest NVIDIA drivers on a Dell Latitude C840, which has a 15" 1400x1050 native resolution.
I have no trouble running under this config, it is sweet as hell.

But:
I also run VMware workstation to do some of those pesky windows tasks for my users (Wine will not do for everything I need to run), and this is where is get into some trouble.

When booting a virtual machine in full-screen mode (which, I think is equivalent to 320x240 or somesuch, whatever DOS runs under) I get a lot of garbage in the top of my screen and that's it.
When the virtual windows goes into GUI mode, everything is OK.
(VM running at 640x480 ok, 800x600 ok, 1024x768 ok etc. etc.)

So I'm guessing that the problem is with Xwindows using NVIDIA drivers under extreme low resolutions.

I know I can probably solve this with the modeline entries under XF86Config-4, but I have fiddled for a week and not gotten a single step further.

Any ideas?

Thanx,
Acid Zebra

[bwkaz]

There are two different modes that IBM-PC-compatible video cards (basically all of them) can be in. There's text mode, where the BIOS handles the mapping of characters to pixels -- these don't have a resolution as such. They have a size in character cells, but not a res. in pixels.

Then there's graphics mode, where the video display is bitmapped, so the user can change pixels themselves. To do text in this mode, you can sometimes let the BIOS translate (though that doesn't always work), or you can render the characters yourself.

DOS doesn't run in 320x240 graphics mode (and actually, the number of characters you can fit on the screen at 320x240 is closer to 40x30 than 80x25...). It runs in 80x25, text mode.

My guess is that the nVidia drivers (not the cards, just the drivers) just plain don't support text mode. That's why if you want a higher-res console, you have to use the vesa framebuffer support, rather than some nVidia driver.

Can you start vmware not in fullscreen mode, then switch to fullscreen once the GUI is up? That should solve the problem...

[acid_zebra]

yes,
I can boot in window mode and go to fullscreen,
but that isn't very elegant :)

(BTW thanks for the refresher on screen modes, I forget so much stuff I once knew)

The problem occurs on other modes as well;
booting windows (the 98 and 2000 boot screen) and shutting down windows (the it-is-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-compu one) also go haywire when in full-screen mode...
And that is in some sort of low-res mode...

[bwkaz]

Yeah, those are 640x400 modes, probably (the bitmap, at least for 98, is a 320x400 one, scaled by 2 in the x direction).

Hmm... I assume that booting right to Windows works just fine, right?

Oh, maybe if you add 640x400 to your Modes line in XF86Config-4?