My mission this week is to get my first frontend setup. With little hope for success, I tried using an old Gateway Solo 5300 notebook with a Savage IX video card with TV Out. Let me express my immese respect for everyone out there associated with this project as within 30 minutes the thing was up and running on the notebooks LCD screen!!!

I downloaded a utility for Savage IX called S3Switch that forces the video to the LCD screen or to the TV Out. Everthing translated perfectly except for the actual video. All the menus display perfect.

The video is offset to the right and down by about a third of the screen. The top and left side are filled with a blue field. I tried running in a window and shrinking the window settings but just wound up with a smaller view of the same thing (still missing about a third of a picture).

As a linux and mythtv veteran of... oh lets say 25 days now (read complete neubie) I would really appreciate anyone that could send me in the right direction.

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

Are there any instructions for this "S3Switch" program? perhapse there is a setting you can change that will control the TV-output signal. What resolution are you running Xfree86 at? Try using defferent resolutions. Try to find any updated savageIX linux drivers. Perhapse they have better tv-out support then the s3switch program.

As a complete newb, I have never messed with any of the drivers. How do I check what driver I am using and, assuming I find other ones, how do I update a driver? Any help from my Linux friends out there would be wonderful.

BTW, I dont think that the S3Switch program is a driver as much as it just instructs the bios as to where to send the signal. I could be wrong though.

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

I managed to get the video straigtened out. It seems the problem was that the video was defaulting to 1024x768 but only for the TV video playback . Menus looked fine but video playback was being centered in a 1024x768 and was therefore partly off the 640x480 screen. Here is how I fixed it.

First I reloaded Knoppmyth but did not select TV. Knoppmyth loaded allowing the 1024x768 mode. I then edited the XF86Config-4 for the proper horizontal and vertical refresh.
In the frontend setting I set the GUI to 640x480 and playback to be same as GUI.

Thats it!

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote