Dilema of Kernel upgrade
kernelI enjoy upgrading kernels in my Dell 700m laptop, the new kernel usually brings
more functionalities and fixes bugs. In the recent upgrade to
suspsend2-source-2.6.22
, I found Fn + F7 VGA output does work any longer,
which worked perfect in suspend2-sources-2.6.18-r6
that I even regarded it as
a built-in feature of BIOS. Right now, I need to explicitly call i855crt
to
output some shaking rawpipe or 8-bit color palette images to external monitor,
both suck.
Maybe it required some other bleeding-edge components. I upgraded the x11-drm
and xf86-video-i810
to the unstable ~x86 branch in the portage. Things got
even worse. xf86-video-i810-2.0.0
could mirror screen to the external monitor
if it was attached in X server launch, that suffice the need of presentation,
however, there were two screen 1152x768 and 1280x800 sharing the same desktop in
the sole head, that totally confused KDE, and windows’ behaviors were quite
weird.
So I went back to xf86-video-i810-1.7.4
for the daily working environment, and
reboot the machine to kernel 2.6.18-r6 for the presentation, — that is
ridiculous but I could not stick to 2.6.18 kernel since the source tree is
deleted, and also removed from the portage. What I have in the hand is the
monolithic kernel only.
For the troubleshooting, I compared the .config of 2.6.18 and 2.6.22 head by head, and still could not figure it out what I did wrong. If you manage to make the VGA output work in 2.6.22 kernel, or point out the mistake I have made, please drop a comment here. Thanks.