| From: Peter King <peter.king@utoronto.ca> | I have made a bit of progress on the problem -- but only a bit. | | (1) The keymap seems to be part of the problem: all the modifier keys are, | as far as I can tell, dead. That's why keyboard-oriented tiling WMs | are more or less stuck (goomwwm, cwm, dwm, etc.) Modifier keys dead? I assume you mean shift, alt, ctrl. That's pretty odd. It doesn't sound like something to do with lack of hardware support -- those are pretty standardized. | (2) However, twm works as well as it ever did. | | (3) I followed the gentoo guide to setting up kernel modesetting using the | intel graphics driver, and it made things appreciably worse: when the | kernel boots and the graphical framebuffer is supposed to take over, | the screen simply goes black. I can ssh in, though, and see that | according to dmesg the inteldrmfb has successfully loaded, so what | gives? Sometimes there is a proprietary thingee that gates the display. For example, I've had notebooks that had no backlight until something was, for lack of a more accurate word, turned on. Can you see a faint image? | (4) I also got no joy whatsoever at blind-typing into the console to start | X, which, again, I could see by ssh was supposedly running but only | gave a blank screen. SSH from another machine should let you do a lot. You can look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log You can actually run xrandr, for example, by setting DISPLAY: DISPLAY=:0 xrandr That probably assumes that you are logged in on X or the ownership will be wrong. Perhaps you can log in via blind typing. | All this on the internal 1680x1050 laptop screen. So while it was blank, | I thought, why not, and plugged in an external VGA monitor. Voila! The | console came up on the external and the internal screens. Better yet, so | did X with twm. It seems to respond to xrandr, too. Did the modifier keys work? See if /var/log/Xorg.0.log or dmesg or something are different in the two cases. | This is all on a Lenovo 3000 n100 0768 model, which I recall was finicky | the last time I set it up (back in 2006 or so). Google? I'm sure you've done that a lot. Try some live distros for variety? | But I don't recall dead | keymaps, and, while I had to use the i915resolution hack back then, that | should all have been superseded by kernel modesetting... Ask it to use VGA instead of intel?