Comment 58 for bug 58721

I have a G450 low profile which didn't work with the mga driver and Xorg server 7.1 supplied with edgy eft when using DVI out and a digital flat panel display. My copy of edgy was unmodified except for the application of any recommended updates.

None of the above solutions worked for me ie. attempting to use a FrameBuffer or ShadowFrameBuffer, installing the modified driver from John Dong and tweaking and adding Options and Modelines etc. in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Those with the same or similar problems as described in this bug report might try installing the modified mga drivers from Alexander Griesser's Unofficial Matrox Technical Support Forum at http://matrox.tuxx-home.at which he has set up in as an alternative to the recently demised Official Matrox forum.

I downloaded the MGA Driver v4.4.2 installation kit from the G-Series Downloads section and rather than running the install script just extracted it to a directory and then replaced the mga driver (mga_drv.so) which in my installation is at /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers with the driver from the xserver/7.1.0 sub-directory created during the extraction.

The HAL driver also appears to be required (mga_hal_drv.so) so I put this in the same place and then configured the X server to start with the -ignoreABI option which is a requirement of using these modified drivers.

This can be done in the /etc/gdm.conf-custom file by creating a [standard-Server] entry identical to the one in the gdm.conf file and adding the above option to the X server command line thus:

# Definition of the standard X server.
[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/X11R6/bin/X -ignoreABI -br -audit 0
flexible=true

Thereafter X starts successfully after edgy has booted and I can switch between any of the supported resolutions in DVI out mode.