Debian 9.3 weird video problem with ASUS Eee PC 701

I tried my USB Debian 9.3 32 bit hard drive install on my ASUS Eee PC 701 with a Celeron M 900mhz.

The LCD screen is so scragged that you can't see anything on it. It was broken like that when I got it.

So I have it hooked up to an external VGA monitor.

But when I boot debian 9.3 it comes up all skewy and shimmery and you can't read it at all. The computer's working, but you can't see what you're doing.

I can blindly type CTRL+ALT+F1 then my login name and password, then type "sudo reboot" and type my password again to get the computer rebooted.


If I go to grub and edit the boot parameters, I can add

video=800x600@60

and the system will boot up with a visible and normal screen.

I fired up an LXTerminal and did an xrandr to tell me what resolutions were available.

so I typed

xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 800x600

and then

xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080

upon which the screen went crazy.

So I hit up arrow twice to bring back my 800x600 xrandr command and hit enter to execute.

By trial and error, I can go up to 1440x900 and also do 1280x720.

Anything higher and it's K-razy. 1600x1200 is a no go.

I made my own resolution at 1366x768 (though it bumped it to 1368x768_60.00) with

$ cvt 1366 768 60
# 1368x768 59.88 Hz (CVT) hsync: 47.79 kHz; pclk: 85.25 MHz
Modeline "1368x768_60.00" 85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --newmode "1368x768_60.00" 85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --addmode VGA1 1368x768_60.00
$ xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1368x768_60.00



And what's weird with this system's bios is that the USB drive comes up as /dev/sdc2 so I have to change my root directory to /dev/sdc2 from /dev/sda2


so my command line looks like:

linux /vmlinuz-4.9.0-4-686 root=/dev/sdc2 ro quiet video=1280x720