Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - [BL] Laptop framebuffer video, was Re: laptop sound

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] Laptop framebuffer video, was Re: laptop sound
  • Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:03:35 +0000 (UTC)

My DELL Latitude LM M166ST 166MHz 96MB RAM laptop has ESS1688 sound which, like the 100MHz Toshiba 420CDT with ESS688, also works as sb with the BL3.50 P1 kernel. (I did not try it with my 2.4.31 kernel). io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1. Setup does not offer alternatives.

play-mp3 and sox play worked. mcdp would require replacing fd with cd drive.

playmidi tells me it cannot open /dev/sequencer. Not important. Will try timidity some day.

The Toshiba has Chips and Technology ct6555 video (so do the Compaq Armadas, I think) which works perfectly with Xvesa, xfbdev, and the SVGA X server (using my laptop XF86Config, with refresh and syn rates modified from Steven's XF86Config). 2MB video RAM.

The DELL (and a Gateway) both have A20 line problems (cold reboot fixes the DELL) and Neomagic video. DELL has MagicGraph 128 V/ZV 40K SVGA BIOS with 1MB RAM and scrawny text. The Gateway has either scrawny text or small text (depends on BIOS setting).

Crashes to vertical pink and purple stripes with Xvesa.
Crashes with SVGA X server, lots of numbers and an error message.

Slackware 4.0 (XFree86 3.3.3.1) has video support for
Neomagic 2200 2160 2097 2093 2090 2070. This is 2090 or 2093.
I don't know what the server is called - it is not listed for SVGA.

So I tried framebuffer X instead. It is 1/3 the size of SVGA server and occupies less than 1/3 the memory, like Xvesa. It does not need XF86Config.

This laptop works with my 2.4.31 (bzimlsbf.431) and 2.2.16 (zimage.fsm) kernels, except that if you boot into framebuffer mode, with vga=788 at the end of the loadlin line (for 800x600x16 - 785 is 640 and 791 is 1024), svgalib programs no longer work. zgv displays the file selector images in four narrow copies side by side.

After booting to framebuffer mode, you get nicer looking text instead of the scrawny stuff, and xfbdev X server works (in BL2) with icewm, opera, xv, xpdf. (I should test in BL3). This is the only X server I got working so far. It is 100K larger than Xvesa and requires libm.so.5 (you can add that to BL2).

Framebuffer and svgalib appear to be incompatible, at least for this video chip. I tried to test on two desktops but matrox and riva PCI video cards both crash badly with xfbdev. They work fine with vesafb text. I don't recall testing this combination on other laptops but Xvesa works on the Toshiba and has never caused svgalib problems.

I usually use svp (ghostsript based pdf/ps viewer) to view pdfs but the one I compiled needs svgalib. In BL3 you can use a very old xpdf from sw4 or the latest pdftoppm from xpdf, and view that with xv (or xli?).

links2 for BL3 works under X but not in BL2. (Delilinux links2 for glibc is not ssl, and the ssl version I compiled is not for X).
Therefore BL3 is the perfect solution for this computer, but only with a framebuffer kernel.

Steven, could you compile a framebuffer 2.2.26 kernel? Better yet, 2.2.27 kernel with all the modules, to avoid machine check exception problems on some laptops of the BL age.

Sindi Keesan





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page