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[keesan AT iamjlamb.com]

I have a Tseng ET4000 with 1M RAM.
In Tseng mode in DOS it will do 1280-16 colors, or 1024 or below 256 colors,
as tested with whatvga2.
I loaded univesa and tested again.
Tseng mode still works as it did.
Vesa mode claims to do 256 colors but does not display properly 
(I get a scrambled screen that looks like CGA size font).
Vesa mode WILL display 640 or 800 or 1024 in 16 colors.

After loading Univesa, I booted into BL3.

I did Xsetup to 800x600 12 bit color.
I typed startx and got 640 resolution (don't know the colors).
I typed Xvesa -listmodes and it listed only plain VGA modes:
resolution up to 640x480, colors up to 4-bit (1 or 4 bit).

I typed Xvesa -screen 800x600x4 (or after rebooting linux, 1024x764x4)  
I got a very brief error message about Interrupt points to .....
and then a black screen and I had to reboot.  (This happened when
I was testing himem.sys from other DOS's - something incompatible)

I did this again without loading univesa and if I recall correctly
I typed Xvesa -screen 800x600x4 and got an X at 640 resolution.

So univesa appears to be changing something in the video that 
persists when you boot into linux, but it does not allow
the use of higher-resolution VESA modes with linux Xvesa 
that were added and that work in DOS.

The conclusion is that you can indeed use Xvesa with non-vesa-compliant
video cards such as Tseng but only up to 640 16 color mode (plain VGA).

And loading Univesa helps in DOS but not for linux.  

Sindi