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  • From: Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] xvesa arguments found
  • Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 22:07:27 -0500 (EST)

> >
> > 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.

I waited at least 10 seconds and it stayed stripey. I will confirm this
and try some other S3 cards, but I don't really care about 8-bit color
being stripey.

>
> > 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.

I tried that first and it did not work. I told it where to copy to and
got a bunch of error messages (long lines of numbers and things). I
suspect the floppy disk is not quite perfect enough for linux. I have not
had trouble copying linux files via floppy disk before.

>
> > 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.

You mean BL3 will work on older hardware than Bl1!? Wow!
My 386 has only 3M ;=(

What is uClibc, did I miss something?

I did not know people were still working on the older kernels. Nice.

> 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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