Anaconda and monitor handling

[Mike A. Harris]

Peter Jones wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 06:53 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
> 
>>Additionally, DDC probing via ddcprobe only works if the video
>>BIOS implements it correctly and handles all of the connected
>>displays in a sane fashion, which in practice is rarely true.
> 
> 
> Well, PPC gives EDID data through OF, but this has its problems too --
> primarily that you only get a resolution and a number of colors, not a
> real modeline.

For the short term, it would be nice if someone were to
reimplement ddc-probe to use x86emu or some other emulator
so that VBE could be used uniformly on all architectures
at least.  That would give reasonable consistency between
architectures even if it wasn't as complete as what the
X server has built in.


>>KVM switches also generally block the DDC signal to/from the
>>monitor,
> 
> 
> We've got various KVMs of differing quality around the office in
> Westford, and they don't usually seem to block it -- but they don't
> cache it or probe it either, and if you're not connected to that box at
> the right ill-defined moment of the BIOS POST, well, you're not
> connected to it.

Yeah, my KVM works with DDC, but only if you're switched to
the computer doing DDC at the time the probe happens.  Most
KVM's that handle DDC seem to work this way, and do not cache
the signal.

Unfortunately, even if all KVM's available for purchase
tomorrow all supported DDC and cached it, people who have
KVM's that don't do this will still be using our OS and
not be able to have their display's detected.  Of course
that is not an OS specific problem though, Windows can't
force a piece of hardware to do something it wasn't
designed to do either.

But that doesn't stop us from getting bug reports
nonetheless...  ;o)


>>which means most KVM switch users cause all software to lose
>>the ability to autodetect attached displays.
> 
> It makes it less likely, at least.
> 
> [...]
> 
> No comment on the rest; I'm sure you know the details better than I
> do ;)

Unfortunately.  ;)