Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

> >
> > 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
>