[NBLUG/talk] Setting up X on a secondary video card

Lincoln Peters sampln at sbcglobal.net
Tue Dec 27 21:34:41 PST 2005


I'm trying to figure out how the X.org configuration is supposed to work.  So 
far I've been doing fairly well, but now I've run into a problem that I can't 
quite figure out.

I can make X work just fine on my primary video card, and now I'm trying to 
set up X to start on a secondary video card (I'm not going to try to make both 
cards work simultaneously...yet).  When I ran "X -scanpci", I got the 
following lines of interest:

(0:0:0) unknown card (0x1043/0x807f) using a VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 
[KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
(0:13:0) nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro]

The device at (0:0:0) is my primary video card; an ATI Radeon 9200 in an AGP 
slot.  The device at (0:13:0) is the secondary video card, which I acquired 
used (I'm assuming that the information returned by the scan is accurate).

To set up the xorg.conf file to run the secondary card, I started with the 
working (and safely backed-up) xorg.conf that I had used on the Radeon card, 
and changed the video card definition to:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "vga"
        BusID           "PCI:1:13:0"
EndSection

(I used the "vesa" driver because it's supposed to work with just about 
everything; I expect to use a more functional driver once I figure out the 
optimal settings for this video card.)

Since I'm not yet 100% sure of the capabilities of this video card, I also 
dumbed down the "Screen" definition to something I was sure it would support:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Generic Video Card"
        Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
        DefaultDepth    4
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           8
                Modes           "800x600"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Seems like it should work...but it doesn't.  I get the following output from 
X (unrelated messages are not shown):

(WW) VESA: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0:13:0) found.
(WW) VESA: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:0) found.
(EE) No devices detected.

Fatal server error:
	No screens found.


And this is where I'm stuck.  Any ideas as to what's going wrong?

-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, and
sometimes three.
		-- Alexandre Dumas

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