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  • From: 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] xvesa arguments found
  • Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 09:10:01 +1300

Sindi Keesan wrote:
>
> The S3 displays grey for depths 2, 4 and 11, but for depth 8
> it gives me stripes.

At some depths, I get stripes briefly, but they all resolve
to good screens within a second or two.

> When I type Ctl-Alt-Backspace the stripes go away and I get
> some odd colors. Another Ctl-Alt-Backspace removes X. I
> would have blamed this on monitor problems except for the
> need to exit X twice.

Perhaps there's a bug in the VESA specs on that video card?

> So I put Xvesa on floppy disk (where it became xvesa - DOS
> floppy disk) and took it to my computer with RAMdisk BL2
> and discovered linux was happy to copy TO the disk but won't
> copy back FROM it.

Don't blame Linux for that. It's probably operator error.
Remember that in Linux (unlike DOS), the copy command must
have a destination.

Besides, it's unnecessary to copy it to the ramdisk. Just
mount the floppy and execute it.

> This certainly makes it harder to choose a video card for
> linux since they probably ALL work fine.

It's good to hear that Xvesa is working pretty well on all
those old PCs. It certainly appears to be a better option
than XVGA16. My plan is to put xvesa in BL3, which should
be out in a month or two. I've already got a skeleton
filesystem booting with uClibc (instead of glibc2). It's
quite compact. I'm confident that BL3 will boot on a 386
with 4mb RAM and no copro. I just have to find the right
kernel for it.

I was planning on using the new 2.0.40 kernel (which is due
to be released at the end of the month). However, I've just
discovered a conflict between uClibc and the 2.0.39 kernel
that I'm using for testing. Hopefully I will be able to find
the source of the problem. I'd really like to use 2.0.40,
which provides updated functionality in a small kernel (387 kb
at the moment). If necessary, I could use libc5 (which is half
the size of glibc2). It is infinitely more stable than uClibc,
which is continally releasing bugfixes and is planning a major
revision soon which will break binary compatibility with all
previous versions. Even though uClibc is half the size of
libc5, I wonder whether it is worth the trouble?


Cheers,
Steven








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