Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> > 
> > But what would make BL2 hard disk behave differently 
> > as regards the display from BL2 RAMdisk or BL3 hard 
> > disk?  
> 
> The HD version of BL2 was designed to be a foundation
> for Slackware 7.1.  Therefore, for example, the startup 
> and shutdown scripts were done like Slackware.  On the 
> other hand, BL3 and BL2 ramdisk were not designed to 
> emulate Slackware.  They use a simplified structure.
>  

Thanks for the suggestion where to look.
I looked in /etc/rc.d

rc.0 rc.6 and rc.M and rc.K were not relevant.

I had insmod mdacon in rc.S, where I also had insmod slhc and ppp run
automatically, but these are also run in BL3 and Bl2 RAMdisk (which I
modified).  What was different about BL2 hard disk was I automatically
insmod'ed parport and parport_pc. I removed these lines and then tried
manually installing the modules. 
insmod parport - the TTL screen was still legible 
insmod parport_pc - scrambled

rmmod parport_pc did not fix the problem so I rebooted.

I will not leave these modules loading automatically.  If I need to print
on this computer I can go to a VGA terminal first and then after printing
reboot to go back to console mode with TTL and VGA on 2 terminals each.
(Or maybe I can insmod mdacon again after rmmod parport_pc but when I put 
them in this order in rc.S I still got the scrambled screen.)

Apparently this computer hardware differs in where it loads things into 
RAM.  Perhaps also fiddling with shadow RAM would help.   Parport_pc must 
load into the same RAM as TTL video.

I have another computer about this age where TTL video won't work at all.  
Obviously the makers stopped expecting people to use it so did not design 
around it.  It is also difficult to find newer computers with enough ISA 
slots to support HGC/TTL, and nobody seems to be making pci HGC cards.  
Is there such as thing as a pci to ISA adaptor?

Thanks, Steven, for pointing me at the answer.

I now have one nearly perfect linux computer (except for printing from a
TTL terminal).

Sindi