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!