Dell Dimension 2400 W/Intel 845-G Video

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Hey Y’all,

I’ve been Googeling and experimenting for two days trying to find a way to deal with the Intel 845-G video chipset in this Dell Dimension 2400. First, it doesn’t have a DVD drive so I have to install from a CD. When I try to boot into the Live CD I get a video error something like, Undefined video mode number: 317. It hangs at the splash screen.

I was able to make a minimal install with the Minimal Install CD. I
used yum to update and then install the desktop and X server. I managed to get it to bring up the desktop by adding nomodeset to the grub command line and by using the vesa driver but I can only get 640×480
resolution and the image is offset on the screen to the left and down.

I tried a netinstall. It was looking good but the video bug crashed that too.

I just swapped out the CD drive with another known good drive. Still no joy. I wasn’t expecting that to make a difference so I wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t.

There’s a lot a cruft on the internet about problems with the Intel
845-G chipset but no solutions that work for me. Does anyone know how to get an successful installation on this hardware?

14 thoughts on - Dell Dimension 2400 W/Intel 845-G Video

  • thats a Pentium 4 chipset from 2002, with 2nd generation intel embedded graphics ? thats some seriously old stuff.

  • I’ve got older stuff in the spare room, but it doesn’t have a cranky video chip.

    So, does anyone know where I can find out if there is a driver that supports this stuff? I know there’s a web site where I can find the appropriate driver for Nvidia chip sets. Is there anything like that for Intel stuff?

  • Hey Peter,

    Thanks for the link. I’m working with CentOS 6.5.

    I changed the boot command from nomodeset to vga=normal

    I changed the Xorg.config device from “VESA” to “Intel”

    I rebooted the machine.

    I now have a desktop at a usable resolution. Thank you there!!

    But, there’s always a but, the text displayed on that screen is not usable. The text on the top bar that should say:
    Applications Places System says:
    A P S m

    The icon that is supposed to say “Computer” says “C m”

    There’s a dialogue box in the middle of the screen with various and assorted consonants spread about. I have no idea what it’s supposed to say.

    Any clue as to how I can fix this?

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • you’re welcome, I’m not that much of an expert on this, but there weren’t many other responses so I figured I’d pass you a google link, about the best I can do, I’m afraid.

    Sounds like a color issue, or possibly a font issue, I would try changing to a different theme, and then playing with the colors. Google for “CentOS gnome themes” for help with this.

    Peter

  • I have a similar Intel card on a machine (not near it right now) which has the same kind of text issues. The trick I learned was to log out and log back in. i.e., you have to know which ” ys em” and ” og O t” menu items get you to log out and do that. When GDM comes up the next time it will be good.

    Be glad your GDM comes up so you can see it for the first login, Mine was a black screen with a pointer.

    Wish I knew how to tell X to just restart itself after initializing the card.
    BTW if I recall correctly, telinit 3 && sleep 5 && telinit 5 ; will return me to broken text so no help there.

    Even when this disclaimer is not here:
    I am not a contracting officer. I do not have authority to make or modify the terms of any contract.

  • I’ve been pretty busy for a little while so I have not been able to pursue this issue. Tonight I fired it up and ran yum -update hoping that the new 6.6 kernel and driver combination might yield better results.

    I have tried booting the machine with no xorg.confg file and I’ve tried booting it with one generated by Xorg -configure.

    When I boot into the latter I get the spinning circle on the CentOS logo screen, then it goes blank as expected, then the mouse cursor turns into the little round spinner that you see just before the GDM screen appears, then the cursor turns to the normal little arrow pointer on a black screen.

    The graphic mouse cursor indicates that the X server is running but there’s no login screen, just black. Moving the arrow cursor against the edge of the screen does not uncover and hidden virtual screen area.

    – brings up a text login prompt.

    brings up a black screen with no mouse pointer and what looks like a text cursor blinking in the upper left corner of the screen. Keystrokes are not reflected on the screen. There is no mouse cursor. On my regular machine this same screen looks and behaves the same except that there I have a block cursor.

    Google has not turned up any useful information. Does anyone have and ideas what more I can try?

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • Try Ctrl+Alt+F1 then:

    $ sudo /sbin/service gdm restart

    If you are not using gdm, then substitute your desktop manager.

    I had similar issue on my laptop and whenever my screen comes up garbled
    (happens once in a while on my Ubuntu Unity desktop), restarting lightdm always sorts the issue for me.

    Cheers, ak.

  • Hey ak,

    Ctrl+Alt+F1 gets me the GUI screen with the mouse pointer as I described in the email that you replied to. On that posting I said that, on that page, all key strokes are ignored. There is no terminal to type any
    “/sbin/service gdm restart” into.

    Ctrl+Alt+F2 gets me a login prompt. I log in as root which eliminates the need for sudo.

    /sbin/service gdm restart gets me:

    gdm: unrecognized service

    /user/sbin/gdm restart gets me:

    ** (gdm-binary:6035): WARNING **: Failed to acquire org.gnome.DisplayManager

    ** (gdm-binary:6035): WARNING **: Could not acquire name; bailing out

    It seems that gdm is not a service. I get the same response from the system that I’m typing at right now.

    Are you perhaps suggesting that I should restart the display manager?

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • Apologies for not grasping what I was reading – :(! Yes, restarting the display manager is what I meant.

    Cheers, ak.

  • First I want to thank all of you who have offered up proposed solutions.

    I got the netinstall to work. Then used yum update to bring it up to the latest and greatest. I worked with 6.5 but got nowhere there. Then the 6.6 point release was ready so I did the yum update dance in hopes that 6.6 would be more cooperative.

    Today I’ve been googling, experimenting, and pretty much failing miserably. The best I’ve managed to get is to set the boot command to nomodeset, and the xorg.conf “Device” driver to vesa. I got 640×480
    resolution with the image offset to the left and down. Pretty much unusable. No improvement from my previous best effort documented above.

    I am able to open System/Preferences/Display where I could select a different resolution if I could see and reach the [Apply] button. That really doesn’t matter since the only resolution available on the pull down is 640×480.

    I can’t get the intel driver to yield a screen at all.

    I experimented with many VGA=NNN modes in combination with the vesa driver. No joy there. Not even the GDM screen comes up. The best I’ve been able to get from the intel driver is a mouse pointer in the middle of an otherwise black screen.

    When the graphics come up I can check the Xorg.0.log where I can see that the vesa driver says that resolutions including 1280×1024, 104×768, and 800×600 are viable options. I can’t get it to use any of them.

    What think yee? Is there any hope of getting any resolution greater than 640×480 out of this thing?

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • Here is some hope for you. I too have been fighting with an intel 845G, but mine is in an IBM built machine. I just loaded the elrepo kernel-ml on a CentOS 6.6 system with an intel 845-G and now the X comes up correctly, i.e., at boot gdm is available visually for login. YYEEESS!!!

    With either kernel, if you want any GL performance, you do _not_ want to use nomodeset, i.e., with nomodeset tux racer renders ~1FPS @800×600. Vesa is in the same boat and eats your main cpu to render anything.

    With the standard _2.6_ kernels with CentOS 6.[56], even though the screen was blank (but with a mouse pointer) you could log in by simply typing the first letter of your username, press enter, enter your password, press enter, then wait for login, and because characters were messed up logout, at which point the restarted gdm and X would be working fine and you could login for a nice session. Found this trick somewhere in the archives of this list IIRC. Note:` telinit 3; telinit 5` OR `killall gdm-binary` do *NOT* help.

    I don’t have an xorg.conf or anything in xorg.conf.d, and I don’t have any changes to the kernel line since install, i.e., using CentOS defaults.

    With the elrepo kernel-ml, it does seem like there is a little more load on the system, but login has become normal and I see ~14FPS in tux racer @800×600 (OK it is not a speed daemon, but at least it is smoothed). After login the screen res defaults to 1920×1080 IIRC. After login I have been using xrandr to change the screen res I want for each task (many web sites don’t look right at anything above 1024×768). xrandr -q #to see available sizes and xrandr -s 1024×768

    good luck, and if this works for you and/or you find a better way, please let us know.

    Even when this disclaimer is not here:
    I am not a contracting officer. I do not have authority to make or modify the terms of any contract.