[BL] More fun with Xvesa and trident card

sindi keesan keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
Fri Oct 29 18:21:37 EDT 2004


I was having trouble getting startx to work when I added xmodmap to it - 
kept crashing in BL3.31 but not BL2 (xinit and Xvesa with .xinitrc changed 
to add the xmodmap line).

BL3.3 (1 or 2) works fine with JUST exec icewm in .xinitrc.
I added

rxvt&
xmodmap /root/xmodmap.84

to the existing

exec icewm
(Probably I do not even need the rxvt but see below)


I get to the grey screen with X and the rxvt window without a prompt.
If i remove the rxvt& I get a teal screen with nothing at the bottom that 
is the icewm color.  If I remove the xmodmap line too, it works (icewm).
In either case I cannot even reboot and have to power off.

So just in case BL3.31 was the problem I put 3.32 on two computers.

1.  Gateway with S3 Virge that two of my DOS viewers will not work with 
(Display and QPV) but Sea3 and Pictview are okay with it.  Linux is happy 
with the video on this one as is Windows.  But I also cannot boot to the 
loop BL3 with Win98 DOS on this computer.  BL3.32 hd works fine.

THe above .xinitrc worked here, but since I do not have the 84-key 
keyboard attached to this computer I could not test that part.

2.  DFI that has a Trident video 8900 (pci, 2MB RAM) and sometimes will 
tell me Not a kernel image.  DR-DOS.  With Win9X DOS it boots linux every 
time.  When I display icewm here it is olive green instead of teal.
With 3.32 I still get the same problems.  icewm works but not if I add the 
xmodmap line first.  I want this Trident card because it will display
100 columns and the S3's won't.  Useful in DOS for wordprocessing and also 
in linux for text browsing.

Is the problem most likely the Trident video?  BL2 on this computer with 
the same .xinitrc works fine.  (I use xinit -- /usr/X11R6/bin/Xvesa not 
startx).  I could try a different Trident video card (I have an extra).

One more thing that Xvesa cannot handle, but I don't know how the versions 
in BL3 and Delilinux (BL2) differ other than the latter is compiled to 
also do SVGAlib which is probably irrelevant to Xvesa.  Maybe Xvesa is not 
as happy with the libc5 of BL3?

The menuless teal screen from the aborted icewm has a mouse pointer which 
does not move.  Power off.

I have another DFI computer set up with Trident video but a different cpu 
(Cyrix instead of Intel) to compare this with.




keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org



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