Steffen Winterfeldt writes:

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Mark Gray wrote:

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Steffen Winterfeldt writes:

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On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Mark Gray wrote: [snip] How does the installer know it is a monitor capable of 1280x1024 in the first place? DDC? If so, this monitor can also communicate its "best" refresh for that resolution. I think the problem could have something to do with confusion over whether it is a CRT or LCD monitor because it is difficult to get sax2 to generate a good modeline for it, and it looks like that is because it is confusing it with a CRT monitor with a similar model number. (But this is just a guess by someone too busy to look closer at the problem.)

No, the problem is the other way around. :-)

Your monitor is properly detected. Just your BIOS does not care. And, as I wrote, you have _no influence whatsoever_ on the timing the BIOS is going to use.

Okay, I see now. The problem is that the VESA standard has stood still since the death of DOS. Now more sophisticated hardware detection and configuration is necessary, bypassing the BIOS entirely. (Apart from some minimal low resolution support for BIOS configuration, booting, and screens displayed prior to the OS'es hardware detection, and loading of drivers.) The BIOS on this machine uses 640x480 for the boot screen by the way, and Win-XP uses a low resolution Splash screen before it boots (rebooting into Win-XP to make a note of what resolution it uses would be tricky since the time window to gather the information is rather short (it is an AMD64-x2 4200+ with 3GB of ram, and boots rather quickly.) The bottom line as I see it is that unless the install is willing to default to 1024x768 or below, the days of relying on the BIOS to properly configure your video card for the monitor are numbered. Further updates to the VESA standard to take into account new video cards and monitors are not very likely. [snip]