Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

> Xvesa appears to work fine with everything EXCEPT most VESA 2.0 (it 
> works with one of my three PCI cards and one of two AGP cards so 
> far) and Chips and Technologies on two laptops.  Your kernel worked 
> nicely with the two PCI VESA 2.0 cards that did not work with Xvesa 
> so it is useful and should not be removed, however you might want 
> to compile it to be more like BL2 (handle vfat and cdrom) since 
> computers with VESA 2.0 generally have enough RAM.

I think that would be better fulfilled by one of the thousands of other
Linuxes floating around the Internet.

> Why did you include mdacon in the package?  Slackware already has it.
> And what is vfb.o?

I wasn't sure that the Slackware mdacon would work. vfb allows you to
make a fake framebuffer. It's nearly pointless, don't ask why I included
it.

> YOur vesafb kernel does work with matrox, so does xfbdev.  Matrox 
> is the best of these cards in that respect, and does not work with 
> Xvesa so should be used with framebuffer.

OK, but any other kernel with VesaFB support may work better.

> I thought I needed to compile a different kernel for matrox.  YOu 
> said to 'boot normally' which I am guessing means the 
> non-framebuffer kernel.

It means without a vga= command.

> When I direct-dial the bbs and ssh from there to another shell 
> account and use Pine the fonts stay exactly the same size and are 
> located in a smaller box, and after pine it stays that way.  If I 
> dial the ISP and use kermit to ssh directly to the second shell 
> account instead, the fonts are the same size but the box fills the 
> whole screen.

Reset, or stty cols x rows y, where x and y are size you want, one of
the two may fix it.

> >>>> The vesafb.tar.gz package contains some modules (for which kernel?)
> >>>
> >>> 2.2.16. The custom one I made.
> >> Different size mdacon.o.gz from what I found at Slackware 7.1,
> >> maybe a later version of the same driver.
> >
> > Or different options. There were a bunch of optional things I selected
> > for mine.
> 
> Different options for mdacon?  Did you get the latest source code?  

I would hardly call 2.2.16 "latest". The different options were in the
kernel config, I don't remember them. There are quite a few things that
can affect module size.

> >> And it would need a configuration file but this one does not?
> >
> > Correct.
> 
> xfbdev gives a list of options which appear to substitute for config file.

Just like Xvesa.

> I was not able to change the resolution but I don't know what I am doing.

Fbset is the way to change resolution.

> Is this xfbdev the same as Kdrive?

It is a Kdrive X server. Xvesa is, too. The big X servers, like XF86Mono,
XF86Mach64, those ones are not Kdrive servers. Kdrive is small.

> >> Why do people make things larger with no added functionality?
> >
> > You've got that backwards: the larger one came first, then the code
> > was rewritten to be smaller.
> 
> Unlike Windows which just gets bigger.

There is large free software, too. I've read, though, that Gnome and KDE,
(or KDE, at least,) is/are getting smaller all the time.
 
> Do the fbcons have something to do with low-level drivers, mono, 2bpp etc?

Not quite sure. I would consider low-level to be vesafb, atyfb, matroxfb,
that sort of thing.

> How would I use ATI as framebuffer?  I did not see an aty* module.
> I downloaded but did not look at the config file.  They tend to 
> confuse me and I am confused enough for one day trying to read man 
> pages.

I know what you mean. A different kernel, not one I've made, is
probably what is needed for ATI. The support in 2.2.16 was for Mach64s,
and I removed it because I didn't think you had one.

> xfbdev worked with 2 of three cards, which were the 2 cards NOT 
> supported by Xvesa.  So they are not that equivalent, though they 
> do both choke on 8-bit color.

Regarding that, take a look at what I stumbled on:

http://www.tuxscreen.net/wiki/view/tinyx

Does that sound like the problem?

> I may find the energy to try the matrox with normal kernel and 
> modules tonight.  This is not how one should spend the second nice 
> spring day after a very long winter.

Usually, it's easier to get a distribution that has everything set up
to go.

David
-- 
_______________________________________________
NEW! Lycos Dating Search. The only place to search multiple dating sites at 
once.
http://datingsearch.lycos.com