These days whenever you are buying new hardware, you check compatibility – whether there are drivers and how good are they. So i.e. when selecting graphic card, you typically end up with Intel, NVIDIA or ATI. But from time to time it simply happens and you end up with something like those cards from Silicon Integrated Systems.
I’ve been installing Debian on Acer Aspire 3002LMi and everything went pretty good, but then I needed to send video only to external monitor.
Well, “Xorg -configure” was firs step. It filled xorg.conf with “working” configuration… at least it wrote there possible options. Bool-ones was pretty obvious. So I enabled shared frame-buffer. And than started fun. Metamodes… Ok, I probably needed to somehow set it, but how? I don’t think that “string” is helpful enough… So googling started. To make long story short I wasn’t able to set it up. If video was sent to both outputs at their proper resolution (LCD interpolation sux), the system became unstable – freezing from time to time totally (this behavior was observed with other OS (i.e. Redmond) too). And then I found it. Thomas Winischhofer have not only comprehensive documentation for Linux sis driver, but also great tool The SiS Display Control Panel (sisctrl) that can help you figure out which combination of settings you need. Nice GUI, it even shows you part of xorg.conf you need to modify to make your changes permanent. It can be found here: www.winischhofer.net
Debian package was probably provided once, but it doesn’t work now. It’s shame that it is not it official Debian packages. Compiling from sources will work (after installing half a billion dev-packages). ;-)
And how did I ended? Well, it was “trivial”:
Section "Device"
Option "ForceCRT1Type" "VGA
Option "ForceCRT2Type" "NONE"
Option "EnableSiSCtrl"
Option "MergedFBAuto"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1024x768;1280x1024+1024x768"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "sis"
VendorName "Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]"
BoardName "661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection
Author: Lordrat