I've spent the last two evenings trying to figure out how to get
the 1920x1200 resolution my new flat-panel display claims to be
capable of, from the onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (via the vesa
driver).  For what it's worth, most of my experiments result in
1600x1200, as best I can tell according to the XFree86.0.log (and
I'm not sure yet how else I could figure this out).

Anyway, my point in writing to this list is to report two hard
hangs on coming out of X - when I say "hard hang", I mean that the
front power switch became unresponsive (in addition to the console
and my remote sessions all freezing up), and I had to pull the plug
to force a reboot.

In both cases, the colour of the text on the console (when not in
X) had changed twice.  I'm sorry I did not take detailed notes,
but roughly: at some point, upon coming out of X and back to the
console, the text (which is usually white except for green kernel
messages) became yellow, and one or two experiments later, it became
red.  These colour changes did not affect the appearance of the X
session at all.  On the next "X exit" after the console text had
turned red, everything froze, and the screen was left black except
for a little grey rectangle which is actually a message from the
monitor hardware itself I believe, and which reported "Input signal
out of range <CR> Please select 1920x1200 60Hz <CR> for best
performance" (which, ironically, is what I've been *trying* to do!).

I'm not asking here for help with X (I'll go bug netbsd-users when I
get sufficiently exasperated), but I wonder if the white->yellow->red
console text colour change means anything to anyone here.  I've never
seen anything like it, and it seems a bit eerie.  Also, any idea what
could possibly cause the motherboard (?) to hang so hard that even the
power cycle switch becomes inoperative?

Oh, yeah: this is NetBSD-3.0 (not -current, except for a few files
related to SATA support), amd64 of course, X as shipped, with:

  cpu0: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+, 2188.93 MHz
  pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
  pci0: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, rd/mult, wr/inv ok
  pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
  pchb0: ATI Technologies RS480 Host Bridge (rev. 0x01)
  ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0: ATI Technologies product 0x5a3f (rev. 0x00)
  pci1 at ppb0 bus 1 
  pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
  vga0 at pci1 dev 5 function 0: ATI Technologies product 0x5954 (rev. 0x00)
  wsdisplay0 at vga0 kbdmux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
  wsmux1: connecting to wsdisplay0



Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, as a private citizen:  anne@porcupine.montreal.qc.ca
Also reachable more officially at work:  anne@encs.concordia.ca