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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