Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron: Issues w/ external screen and Intel GMA950 (Dell Latitude D620)
desktop and multimedia Add commentsSince upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy (what was I thinking when I did that…) I had the weird issue of my external screen (connected via VGA out) going black after a non-specific amount of time (e.g. sometimes after an hour, sometimes after 6 hours). xrandr still showed the external screen as connected and the monitor also received enough signal to actually not go into standby mode but whatever I tried, nothing made the black screen show my desktop again. So here is the workaround if you inhibit a similar type of issue (additionally the external screen lost sync for a tiny amount of time creating some kind of funny disturbed images from time to time – flickering if you will or maybe the matrix just tried fight it’s way to the surface):
Edit your xorg.conf to include the following Option in the Device Section of “Configured Video Device”:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "FramebufferCompression" "off"
EndSection
Interesting: With the latest Ubuntu release the goal seems to be to actually have X guess all the configuration settings automagically so the xorg.conf was pretty empty after a fresh installation.
April 17th, 2008 at 17:37
Hi, i have the same problem! Hope this helps, I’ll use it for a couple of days and then I’m going to comment how did it go!
If it works, you are a genious!!!!! =)
I’ve opened a bug, before reading this on: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/217804
Now i updated it referencing this workaround… hope it’s solved on the final release.
Thanks!
May 16th, 2008 at 10:17
Thank you, thank you! I had this problem on a dell inspiron 6400 with intel 945GM and I could not find out what’s wrong. Your solution works like a charm!
Regards
June 9th, 2008 at 8:19
Had similar problems on mac mini (GMA950) w. ubuntu 8.04 on DVI displays. The above option seems to work here as well. Thanks!
January 18th, 2009 at 1:05
Thanks for this info. I had a similar problem with Ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus 1000H netbook. When watching movies with the netbook hooked up to my Plasma TV as a monitor, it would randomly ‘Back Out’. Sounds and movie still ran, just no display on the external device. Turning off the Framebuffer compression as mentioned above has fixed the issue completely.
Regrads,
Michael