Issues with Dual Screen on Thinkpad W700ds & Linux

[desperadus]

Originally Posted by AaronP

Basically, you're telling the driver to ignore what it thinks the native resolution of your screen is supposed to be and forcing it to use what you tell it instead. This is really only necessary when you have a broken monitor like yours -- DVI monitors are required by the DVI spec to return an EDID, so it's not unexpected to get weird behavior with a monitor that doesn't.

Well, that "broken monitor" of mine is really the secondary display to a brand new Thinkpad worth $4500 and being quoted as officially supported for Linux & NVIDIA.

But now I have a different problem.
After some supposedly unrelated upgrades, my video system stopped working (black screen on startup of X11) and so I had to re-install NVIDIA from scratch.
For that I downloaded the latest driver from the NVIDIA website (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run).
After I installed that one, my X11 was up & running again, but now I'm stuck with a "tacky" mouspointer on each screen.

Previously my mouse pointer would just follow along, but now a remnant of that thing allways keeps getting stuck on one screen when I move the mouse cursor to the other.

I googled for this bug and found that is a known issue with the NVIDIA driver and XINERAMA.
I can't use TwinView because of the 90 degree rotation requirement for my secondary display, so I have to use Xinerama.
Switching on the SWcursor option leaves a nasty cursor trail on my secondary display, so how do I get out of this one - I don't have the old driver no more and don't even know which version it was that I used to have installed.

[Lithorus]

Originally Posted by desperadus

Well, that "broken monitor" of mine is really the secondary display to a brand new Thinkpad worth $4500 and being quoted as officially supported for Linux & NVIDIA.

Broken as in, not working according to the EDID spec etc. You'll find alot of hardware that doesn't work according to spec and therefor have problems with Linux. Just look up ACPI DSDT on google. Anyway this is a problem which should mainly be fixed by the manufacture with a BIOS update or so. If I were you I would perhaps try and contact IBM about this, atleast to make them aware that their laptop does not work perfectly with Linux. Did you get the laptop with Linux pre-installed? Did that pre-install work with the secondary monitor?

If they sell the laptop with a pre-installed linux, then they should also have config files which works with this setup.

[AaronP]

Originally Posted by desperadus

Previously my mouse pointer would just follow along, but now a remnant of that thing always keeps getting stuck on one screen when I move the mouse cursor to the other.

I googled for this bug and found that is a known issue with the NVIDIA driver and XINERAMA.

It's a known X server bug in xserver 1.6.

[desperadus]

Originally Posted by AaronP

It's a known X server bug in xserver 1.6.

But that "known X-Server bug" didn't appear until I had upgraded my NVIDIA driver to the latest verssion!!

And now I also have a MUCH MORE URGENT PROBLEM.
My entire X11 system just resets arbitrarily from time to time.

Ever since I installed that latest NVIDIA driver, my session suddenly terminates, the screen resets and I have to log on again - with all my applications & data lost!

This needs to get fixed ASAP and I already looked it up in the X11 log and all I could find there was an "caught signal 11" statement.

Update: I found out that this X11 reset behaviour is related to the keyboard input. Me pressing certain button combinations or trying to erase large chunks of text via <backspace> will cause the whole X server to kick me out of my session and reset. Can anyone help me out here?!!
I already re-installed/updated all my X related libs and re-installed the (latest) NVIDIA driver from scratch.
As a result it doesn't happen as often no more, but it still does from time to time and that means I loose all work at that point.

[desperadus]

I found it, I found it, I found it !

It's the X.ORG server itself. That one got upgraded as a "side effect" on my system two days ago.
Once I had downgraded it from 7.4-43.1 to 7.4-17.6.1 all works again.
My mouse pointer no longer gets stuck on either screen, "keytouchd" works again and most importantly, heavy keyboard activity does no longer Signal 11 the X11 server!

For all SuSE users out there who run the latest NVIDIA driver, stay away from that buggy X.org distro - this one took almost a day of my life to figure out....

[YuLimin]

Hi, How to resolve this issue finally?

[desperadus]

Originally Posted by YuLimin

Hi, How to resolve this issue finally?

Sorry to say that this issue has never gone away.
By now I had the "pleasure" to try every single new driver release on my TP W700ds and none of them worked.
The best I could say of the packages above 185.18.14 and below 186.xx.xx is that I managed to get the system up- and running with them.

But with each one of those releases, either HW acceleration was disabled or the 2nd Display only showed the primary display mirrored or wouldn't turn the 2nd screen no more (due to the special HW build of the W700ds the display must be rotated 90 degrees to show up right).

It is beyond me why nvidia disabled some of these switches in their driver, but at least those versions don't just turn the screen black, like everything 186.xx.xx and higher does.

I WILL NEVER BUY SUCH A HIGH END DEVICE WITH NVIDIA HW AGAIN!

I spend top dollar for my systems and I am a Linux power user as well.
This box was sold to me with Linux support promised on the label (including the video HW).

NVIDEA themselves promises to support this HW and so they did up until driver release 185.18.14.

Ever since then us Linux W700ds users are just dead meat to them and I don't like to be treated like that.
NVIDIA, you lost me as a customer for sure :thumbsdown:

[Licaon]

tried newer/other distros too?