How resolve failed to get size of gamma on Manjaro

I wanted to resize my screen resolution on my old Lenovo T430 laptop but I couldn’t. To do that I tried to use xrandr but that didn’t work and I got an error message. I searched on the internet but didn’t find a solution. Until I put different pieces of information together and easily managed to solve the issue. In this article, I go through how resolve ow to resolve failed to get size of gamma on Manjaro.

Root of `failed to get size of gamma` error

Manjaro supports two different video drivers, video-vesa and video-linux. Apparently, video-linux is the new open-source one, from my understanding. The community also recommends using video-linux. I personally, spent sometimes to find the exact differences but failed. If anyone knows more please let me know.

Anyhow, these two drivers cannot be installed both at the same time. Otherwise, they cause some weird issues. Sometimes the system doesn’t boot. Sometimes, like my situation, everything works fine on the surface.

Long story short, to solve the problem of xrandr and get rid of failed to get size of gamma on Manjaro, all you have to first to check how many video drivers installed on your system by running,

$ mhwd -li

If you saw two outputs video-vesa and video-linux, then you need to get rid of one. In my case I removed video-vesa. You can do by running,

$ sudo mhwd -r pci video-vesa

Then restart your system. After that run xrandr, then error should be gone.

How resolve failed to get size of gamma on Manjaro — Linux graphics drivers chaos, source

A word of caution

Back up before doing anything, or at least know how to restore if things went wrong. This approach tested and worked on Lenovo T430 with the integrated Intel graphic. To my understanding, it might not be the same for all devices, especially those with dual GPU.

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