Bug 113466

Summary:	Between beta2 and beta3 installs, bios video expansion setting got screwed up
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Daniel Secareanu <dsecareanu>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Steffen Winterfeldt <snwint>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Beta 3
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	SUSE Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Beta-Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Daniel Secareanu 2005-08-26 21:14:38 UTC

I have no clue if this relates to the suse linux 10.0 beta 3 install or not, but
it happened in between beta2 and beta3. I rebooted my compaq armada e500 laptop
to start installing beta3 by using a grub entry that included beta3 linux/initrd
pair. I had the 9.3 dvd in the dvd drive from a previus installation. At laptop
boot time and before the grub menu appeared, I removed the dvd from the drive
(before it attempted to boot from it). The moment the grub menu appeared, the
video expansion of the laptop got screwed up, that is, the screen was blue in a
640x480 rectangle in the middle of the display, not streched on the whole size
of the display as it was regularly. Since then on, I have no bios video
expansion enabled, that means lower resolutions than the native one (1440x900)
will show on small rectangles rather than stretched on the whole display...
However, when linux is up and running, resolutions do fit the whole screen, so
this only happens at boot time... I haven't tried windows to see if there
everything is alright, cause I've been running only linux for the past few days...

Comment 1 Daniel Secareanu 2005-08-29 17:28:06 UTC

The funny/bad thing about this is that I don't have the bios/setup password and
cannot change any bios settings on this machine... Been searching online for a
solution, but couldn't find it, since the bios is written in nvram memory and I
need a special chip to be able to default the bios settings... tried software
tools as well... didn't work...

Also, when the computer boots and shows the network boot info, it's using the
whole screen... after that it gives me a battery loading error (been giving that
for a while and never screwed up the video expansion) and starting with this
message and the grub menu which comes immediately after, the image is shrinked
in the middle of the display.

Comment 2 Torsten Duwe 2005-08-30 06:59:50 UTC

grub itself does neither probe nor change video modes, this is gfxmenu. 
" shrunk in the middle of the display " sounds like an issue with your TFT to 
me. Nevertheless I'd like Steffen to have a look.

Comment 3 Steffen Winterfeldt 2005-08-30 09:06:28 UTC

The video mode setting code hasn't changed for years and there is nothing 
to be changed anyway. It just uses the normal video bios to set the mode 
(800x600, 16bit, btw). 
  
If your card doesn't scale the mode to full size, that's probably a bios 
setting that got changed. Isn't there some function key for that on some 
notebooks even?

Comment 4 Daniel Secareanu 2005-09-08 20:04:52 UTC

I guess it was a power fluctuation problem... a couple of nights ago the power
went off and the laptop shut down cause I have no working battery inside. After
the power came back, the screen got back to it normal expanded way... Probably
the same thing happened initially, but less noticeable, when the screen got
shrunk. Since I was in the process of updating between betas, I thought there
might have been smth in the grub or initial loading of the system that screwed
smth up.

Daniel