I have Asus Pundit (P4S8L motherboard) barebone that has an integrated graphic adatper and one PCI Geforce 8400 GS adapter installed. Problem seems to be that BIOS is not fully recognising the PCI adapter. I have selected PCI adapter as primary from BIOS, but still i get BIOS etc messages only through integrated adapter. When X starts, i have to change the VGA cable from the integrated adapter to the 8400 GS (i have xorg.conf configured so that PCI adapter is used). If i change to virtual console (ctlr-alt-f1), i need to change again the VGA port from 8400 to integrated. So my question is, is there a way to configure the virtual console to use my PCI adapter (some lilo option or something)? I guess i'm not ever going to be able to access BIOS configuration using PCI adapter, but that's ok (i've installed the latest BIOS from Asus website). However, i would like to see all the startup messages displayed in console before X is started through PCI adapter. Any ideas how to do it? I'm running R5.5.

Edit. If i disable integrated adapter from BIOS, i still can't see anything on PCI adapter before X is started (only graphical UI).

I was going to suggest that you disable the onboard video but you edited your post w/ this info. Is there an option in the BIOS called something like "first video" or "preferred video" with a selector between onboard, agp, or pci? My old system had this option to select between AGP and PCI.

Have you checked w/ Asus's website to see if they have an updated BIOS for the M/B that address this issue? My major beef with ASUS, and the primary reason I stopped building systems with their stuff, is the lack of BIOS support. Releases are slow to happen, when they do happen they're still classified as 'beta', and once a board has been superseded by a newer chipset, the support for the old one drys up. Anyway, check out which BIOS you're running and if there's a newer one and if you're lucky you might just find a changelog along with a bin file

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Yes, there is preferred video which i've configured to PCI. However, still the picture is shown only through intergrated (i think it's because BIOS doesn't for some reason fully identify the 8400 card)



Yes i have installed the latest BIOS (it's quite old and classified as beta, but still the latest).

I fully agree your view on Asus support! I even tried to contact them, got a quick answer saying that please contact the VGA card manufacturer as the card is broken (even i explained that the card works in other machine just fine, and with this one also in X). After that i've got nothing..

erkkula78, did you ever work this out? I'm seeing the same problem. TIA

In your xorg.conf you can select the device(s) to use for your display. I've had to do this before for various PCs. Look for a commented out line like this:

All you need to do is uncomment it and put the correct address for your video card in there. There are a number of ways to find that address, but one of the simplest is to look at the hardware probing section of your /var/log/Xorg.0.log log file. Search for lines that say "PCI:" you should find at least a couple that call out some candidate devices. For example:

I'm guessing you'll see at least two, with the first one being the builtin device, and (one of) the other(s) being your addin card.

OBTW - The * there shows the one the X server is taking as the default.