Toshiba laptop display probs 4851

Here are my latest new findings. The quoted text is a composite of posts from Aragorn, Lew Pitcher, and Lenard, in that order, with my embedded reply

The white screen i mentioned is NOT a frozen screen - it is correctable, instantly brought back to normal-viewable by means of the Fn+F5 video mode cycling keys. When I startx from text mode I get the white screen with an X in the center. But when, a second later, I press Fn+F5 (sometimes more than once), my display is perfectly restored and fully functional. One can deduce with certainty that during the white screen, X is merrily loading along, in spite of the white screen... (restoring the display with Fn+F5, with various delay times, reveals that X is at different stages of loading (or is already loaded))

What's more - by pressing Fn+F5 further, I can switch my X session to TV-out, and it works beautifully (I watched a movie on my FC4 on this system, on TV, using its TV-out mode). Two other video modes involve external SVGA - both work perfectly.

This video mode setting, it seems, is beneath all the OS video settings, apparently BIOS-level... And yet, something goes awry when X starts and the mode needs to be "jogged"-reset somehow. Anyone know of a way to logically trigger that which is triggered by the physical "Fn+F5" keys?

When I boot into X directly, 1) the white screen is more of a nuissance - the system switches to it at least three times and 2) logging out-shutting down is problematic, delayed enormously and involves a scrambled screen during the shutdown.

However, starting X with "startx" from text mode, 1) I need not deal with the white screen but once and 2) logging out brings me back to a normal text-mode console.

I did this, along with adding "vga=792" to my kernel commands.

As a result I have a very accommodating text-mode display, occupying the entire physical screen, and, with the small font (which appeared with no other explicit reconfiguring), a lot more text fits in now.

As I elaborated above, this is incorrect. X loads during-inspite of the white screen. Perhaps the timing of the video skew is right after default herringbone background loads...

vga=792 seems to work fine. (maybe i should downgrade a knotch, to 791?)

I tried both the trident and fbdev variants from the above page; not only did they not solve my problem: The trident one led to a scrambled display, while the fbdev one crashed X altogether, on startup.

Seems like the xorg.conf initially set up by Fedora beats the two above - its only flaw being the distorted Toshiba video mode - if it is responsible for that at all.

thanks andrew