[blog...]

After the Xubuntu upgrade to 8.10, I wanted to use the geode xorg driver to launch the xserver. But this didn't worked as in 8.04. Before spending too much time to find a working solution, I decided to upgrade to Xubuntu 9.04 using the xorg-1.6 server and xorg-geode-2.11.1 driver.

Again with 9.04 the fbdev driver worked fine but the geode driver startet with 800x600 instead of WXGA (1440x900). I tried a lot to force the driver to use another resolution. But no success. Then I added the Option "NoPanel" "true" and ... it worked! But like Martin-Eric wrote on the xorg-driver-geode mailinglist, it's prefered to not add any options to the xorg.conf. And indeed: in my BIOS there is a menu to choose CRT and/or Panel. After setting it to CRT, it works with the default xorg.conf! Great!

Being happy to use the geode driver another problem occurred: The active button of dialog boxes and some tabs in programs had black boxes as background. Not very useful with black text on it. There seems to be a bug but unfortunately nobody has time to fix it :-(

There are two workarounds:

• add the Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy" to the Device section of your xorg.conf. This disables parts of the accelleration.
• use a different theme in Gnome. MurrinaStormCloud (the default) is quite slow. Human doesn't work either. I use Xfce-b5 at the moment. But there remains still some strange effects but this is not so important