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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

The first card I tried with framebuffer and David's patchedkernel that 
works with S3, was an S3 Trio64V and it did not work as a framebuffer 
device.

The second card, Stealth II 220 with Rendition chip, worked as framebuffer 
and looks nice at 800 and 1024 resolution, but could not open GPM mouse 
for links2, and it crashes completely to a black screen, not rebootable, 
with xfbdev (in BL2, with libm.so.5 from BL3 - BL3 can't even find 
the cursor font for it).

I now tried a Matrox Millenium II and it worked as a framebuffer device, 
could not open GPM mouse, but xfbdev produces the same screen as Xvesa, 
and I can add options to get to rxvt, icewm, and opera, which worked fine 
at 800x600x32K.  ButI can do that with Xvesa on VESA 1.2 cards.

So I tried 1024x768 and 800x600 at 256 colors.

Long black pause, followed by a bright blue screen and eventually the 
black rxvt window and opera in blue on black, exactly like Xvesa.



The verdict - where Xvesa fails completely (on these two cards it did 
work, but on exit the console was too dim to read) this xfbdev (from 
Kdrive?) will work instead, but again not in 8-bit color.

I have not got links2 -g to work with framebuffer.   svgalib won't work 
with 2 of these 3 cards either so I don't recommend using them unless 
youdon't want to use zgv, seejpeg, bmv, and svgalib outside of X (won't 
work in svgalib or in fb modes).

THese cards produce nicer looking 132x50 than does resizecons, and also 
100x37, but not 80x37 (unless I get fbset to work with matrox).

The Stealth Rendition card is useless with xfbdev but works with Xvesa.
So I would use it with framebuffer for more text modes, and with Xvesa, 
and give up on zgv and seejpeg and bmv with it.  Since it has 4MB RAM, no 
need to use it with 256 colors.

It is nice to have the extra possibilities.

One possibility is to use the Rendition as fb0 and the Matrox as fb1. The 
former works with Xvesa, the latter with xfbdev.  The former does not work 
with resizecons or svgalib, the latter does.  So this would provide two 
monitors on which to run one program in Xvesa (Rendition, lots of 
resolution and colors with 4MB RAM) , and the other in svgalib (links2, 
1280 and 16 or 256 colors), both full-size instead of in smaller windows 
or switching between windows.


I sort of doubt the 16MB video ram Voodoo card will do any better at 
xfbdev.


Any ideas how to get links2 to open GPM mouse?

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> See previous posting.
>
> When I dial my bbs I am in 37 lines but when I use pine 80x25 and after
> exiting pine everything stays at 80x25 - how to fix this?
>
> The fb cursor offline was a rectangle alternating between dark and medium 
> bright but online it is bright all the time (at least after exiting pine - 
> did not pay attention before this).
>
> fbset can be used with /etc/fb.modes to change resolution for all or 
> individual terminals, along with color depth, horiz and vert refresh rate and 
> many things I did not understand, but not with vesafb.  Works with the fbs 
> for matrox and ati and possibly others.
>
> Therefore resizecons and Xvesa give more control, unless you have one of 
> these cards that uses fbset.  But these cards don't usually work with 
> resizecons and Xvsa so you are stuck with framebuffer for them so I hope 
> someone can help get it to work instead of crashing with xfbdev.
>
> I will look for a newer xfbdev version for SW71.
>
>
>
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org