Finally!

[swestrup]

Well, after much fighting and arguments with Xorg, I've finally gotten a working system. It turns out the things that you need to know are:

1) The Xorg manual says the Display subsections of a Monitor are redundant and you don't need them. However, Xorg doesn't use the mode list provided by the monitor, so you have to duplicate it here. You ESPECIALLY need to do it if (as in my case) the broken 'virtual width' calculation comes up with something smaller than the largest mode your monitor can handle.

2) The Xorg manual also says that the output of the open-source 'nv' driver are identical to those of the closed-source 'nvidia' driver except that the latter supports 3D acceleration. DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT! The closed-source driver provides MUCH nicer rendering and seems to interpret the mode lines differently as well.

... and I'm sure there was a third thing I had to figure out to get it all working, but I forget just what that was now.  In any case, I now have a default screen which is every bit as pleasing to the eye it was under Windows.

Now if I could only figure out how to describe my removable-drive tray to Linux so I could mount it and use the files therein as a normal user. So far I've managed to get to the point that I can mount the tray as a user, but all contents are automagically marked as owned by root and nonvisible.

Comments

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

Now if I could only figure out how to describe my removable-drive tray to Linux so I could mount it and use the files therein as a normal user. So far I've managed to get to the point that I can mount the tray as a user, but all contents are automagically marked as owned by root and nonvisible.

What do you have in your /etc/fstab?

[swestrup]

Well, at first I had nothing as the tray is sort-of removable media, only I think I'm only supposed to insert/remove it with the power off (ie, not hot swappable).

Now, I've got a line that says

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/tray auto user,noauto 0 0

Which seems to let me mount the tray as an ordinary user, but then I can actually browse the contents. (which, BTW, are usually NTFS)

[swestrup]

Oops. That should say 'cannot browse the contents'.

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

From the man page for mount:

uid=value, gid=value and umask=value
    Set the file permission on the filesystem. The umask
    value is given in octal. By default, the files are
    owned by root and not readable by somebody else.

If it's only you who needs access to the drive it should be okay to simply add your uid and gid to your fstab.

Looking at my own fstab I have entries similar to yours for my USB stick and allow me to mount the USB stick and have it owned by the mounting user. Perhaps it's related to NTFS? I must admit that I have not looked at NTFS for quite some time now so I'm still stuck in a time where read-write on NTFS was marked experimental in the kernel ;)

[swestrup]

D'Oh! I had forgotten all about the umask option! On simple addition of ummask=0000, and all is working!

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

Hehe... man pages for the win ;)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Who knew! ;-)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Those trays, they're exactly like just hooking you the hard drive and the power, but more quickly and conveniently. So you really don't want to do that while powered! But while connected, it's the same. So this is just the usual level of pain involved in dealing with something that came out of Redmond, I'm afraid.

No real need for "user", IMHO, just leave it with the default of mounting at boot (and skip the "notauto", of course!), it'll just whine a bit if it's not there.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Nicer rendering? Plain old 2D X11 is defined at the pixel level, so theoretically, if it doesn't look the same, one of them is broken. Except for XRender, though, maybe that's what you're seeing, and in that case, I wouldn't be surprised that the open source driver uses a simpler and cheaper algorithm, since it can't use all the accelerations that the card is capable of...

By removable drive tray, you mean those non-hotswappable drive bay thing? I think I just added it the same as my normal partitions in my /etc/ftab, and it would just complain about it not being there at boot-up if it wasn't.

[swestrup]

Well, its odd. My modeline for 1280x1024 mode says:

Modeline "1280x1024" 110.00 1280 1368 1496 1688 1024 1025 1028 1089

Which should give me a refresh rate of 65.17 Hz. NV gives me a refresh rate of 60Hz which flickers horribly, while nvidia gives me a refresh rate of 64Hz which doesn't appear to flicker. I have no idea why neither driver gives me the exact rate specified...

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Ah, not rendering so much as RAMDAC programming. Damn pesky analog thingies. I have to say that it must have taken me less than 0.3 seconds to tell VGA to go screw itself when DVI came along.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

I gather that just removing the xorg.conf file didn't work?

[swestrup]

The system would boot up as normal, without the xorg.conf file, and wouldn't even bother to regenerate it. The problem turned out that Xorg was correctly probing both the card and the monitor and working out everything okay, except that it made assumptions about the dot pitch of the monitor which were wrong, and there are no Xorg commands to set the dot pitch. Had Xorg actually processed the modes the monitor claimed to be able to support, it would have used the largest listed resolution to calculate the dot pitch and all would have worked.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Yikes, thanks for the heads-up on the open-source NVidia driver. The most recent closed-source drivers have ditched support for my card, and so of course the most recent X.org releases require those latest drivers. Maybe I'll just never upgrade my desktop again.

As for mounting and using partitions as a normal user, I'm guessing the partition is FAT or NTFS or something without standard Unix userids and permissions. The cheat I had to do to support that was to manually specify my uid at mount time; I believe I added "uid=1000,gid=1000" (replace with your UID/GID, of course) to the list of options in /etc/fstab. This is theoretically lame, in that it's hardcoded to me, but then, I don't want anyone else to read them anyway. I might be misremembering though, since I'm not at that machine now.

The other way to go is to add the "user" option, which tells /etc/fstab that it's OK for regular users to mount the partition, and the files should be owned by the mounting user. If you do this though, you'll also want to specify "noauto", otherwise it'll be auto-mounted at boot, owned by the user who mounted it, i.e. root. You can then mount it yourself with a normal "mount /mnt/whatever", or put that in your login scripts or something.

[swestrup]

Well, I've got it set up with an fstab of user,noauto and I can mount it as a user, but I can't look at the contents. Dunno what's going on.