It turns out that, as hard as it is to believe and as slow as it was to get through to me , modern Intel-compatible hardware is actually inferior to stuff made several years ago. In the end I did manage to get 1600x1200 working by writing a custom modeline in xorg.conf, but at a mere 60Hz frequency ...

It looks like this thread was in the wrong forum, and I need to figure out how to use vgaswitcheroo. I'll mark this as solved if that solves the problem.

So it happens that I'm closer to the solution. I think the problem is that I'm not using the CPU's integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 after all, but instead the terrible, horrible graphics controller that is integrated in the motherboard and is only giving me VGA graphics.

From lspci -v:
00:02.0 ...

I got a night's sleep and then did some triaging. It turned out that xorg.conf was the thing at fault. However, while I managed to get X working, I didn't get it working at anywhere near the resolution I wanted. I wanted 1600x1200 but got mere 1024x768 at 60 Hz! That's way too small and I'm already ...

(I changed the title again. Sorry. It turns out that it probably wasn't what I thought for a while after all, so the true reason is very much open again. I'm so frustrated. I don't want to be stuck with graphics the kind of which I had 15 years ago, especially on a monitor that is capable of so ...

It's one thing to not have the semantic-desktop use flag at all and pull in the packages even if won't be used and quite another to have the semantic-desktop be "optional" while being mandatory. What is the point with a use flag that cannot be turned off? It just engenders false hope, soon to be ...

The problem is that kdepimlibs insists on semantic-desktop, which means that packages that require kdepimlibs, such as plasma-workspace, now require semantic-desktop packages to be pulled in too. As plasma-workspace is an even more crucial package than dolphin, you essentially can't build KDE ...

Now in 4.11.2, plasma-workspace requires semantic-desktop. It is one of the packages that depend on kdepimlibs.

I think I'll hold on on updating for now.

Mitä perkele? :) I have friends in Karjalohja ...

Oh, the old standby of teaching foreigners how to swear... :)

Anyway, my console is just fine like how it used to be so I don't think this is a kernel issue. At the moment the console is graphically superior to the graphical user environment ...

I haven't changed my kernel config lately. I'm still using the 3.1.5 kernel because it's been working fine. Anyway, I checked and in my .config I have:

CONFIG_DRM_KMS_HELPER=y and
CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS=y

Those were what you meant, right?

In your Xorg log I can see:
[ 24.586] (II) intel(0): EDID ...

dmesg:

http://pastebin.com/6gUJWQ0m

I'm thinking maybe I should try downgrading xf86-video-intel even though according to genlop it has been in the 2.21 series since February.

PreferredMode and DefaultModes aren't Intel driver options at all. They're basic xorg.conf options that I have in the Monitor section of xorg.conf like they should be (according to man xorg.conf), and I don't understand why they're now being passed to the Intel driver.

I installed read-edid but ...

The Xorg.0.log I posted was really all that there was, but here is a pastebin of the same anyway:

http://pastebin.com/QqizJwmC

Another thing that occurred to me is that the console seems to recognize my monitor's capabilities even though Xorg now doesn't. The console appears to be using 1024x768 ...

Some recent update has broken my Xorg so that it no longer uses my (old but good crt) monitor to its full capabilities and instead falls back on a very inferior default. Instead of 1600x1200 at 100 Hz I'm getting 1024x768 at 60 Hz (and eye strain).

Among other things, I tried downgrading xorg ...

I would like to ask the hiding proponents if they still would like to hide the compile messages if every program in the portage tree used cmake or something similar?

I think trying to solve messy compile messages in portage by removing all compile messages from view altogether is a misguided downstream approach to an upstream problem (or "problem"). Maybe more projects could be like KDE and use cmake for terse compile messages (only showing the errors and the ...

I've already added myself EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS to make.conf to reverse the new default. I just think I shouldn't have needed to do so. I originally wrote that as EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPS and had to spend a few wasted minutes finding the typo when in a sensible world I and the rest of the apparent majority ...

I think apt-gentoo is really making a joke about how slow compiling from the source is. Maybe apt-gentoo 0.0.2 will default to calculating the time spent stalling the progress of the installation based on the number of lines in the compilation output while printing nothing of interest... unless the ...

I encountered this bug too. I finally solved it by switching to the evdev drivers in the xorg.conf and recompiling my kernel with the evdev functionality enabled. I have no idea why the kbd driver didn't work but it just didn't.

I've also had problems with KDE leaking memory. For me, turning off all the plasmoids stopped it, although I had to restart KDE to get the memory back. I'm not sure if the memory leak is a general plasmoid thing or if a specific plasmoid was doing it. This was a few versions ago, though.

Metalog. It was the default when I started with Gentoo and I've seen no reason to change, especially with having to install logrotate.

For the interests of posterity, I'd like to announce that my integrated soundcard turned out to be completely fine but my power supply was drawing its last. Unclear power supply errors strike again! You might remember (but probably don't) that my earlier mysterious Xorg freezes turned out to be ...

I booted to a live cd and reproduced the issue. It looks like this is a hardware problem. Since I know the speakers are fine, this leaves the integrated soundcard. Argh!

Though, I'm worried that it's not a hardware problem at all but some obscure ALSA auto-configuration bug. Can I be absolutely ...

I can play sound on my computer, but it is distorted and accompanied by crackling. I use ALSA, and the problem persists with all the different audio-producing programs I have tried, from the KDE startup sound to aplay. Low notes are distorted more than high notes. If the speakers are on, I hear ...

Thanks! I set the boot flag and can boot normally now.