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

The neighbor just brought us a computer to ask if we could delete her 
personal files from it.  The LCD screen was nearly unreadable even after 
turning up the contrast and brightness so I plugged in a VGA monitor and 
gave her some floppy disks to take her own files off (she never knew she 
could add an external monitor).

In Windows sometimes I can read the screen for a while but it keeps 
varying in brightness.  In DOS or linux (text mode or swm) the brightness 
is fine.  Why?

This would make a nice linux computer except that

1.  In text mode the characters look really bad, like they are less than 
VGA resolution (like what you get when you enlarge a small photo of text 
to a larger area).  zgv also displays awful looking jpegs, smeared.

2.  Xvesa worked (800x600x12) but the resolution was again awful, and on 
exit I got a bunch of stripes (greenish, I think vertical but not sure) 
which invaded all the terminals.  I have not checked config.sys.

When it boots into DOS it says:
MagicGraph 128XD 48K SVGA   - 48K what?
Configuring Panel 01 16-bit

The video is VESA 2.0 so Xvesa should have worked.  I am going to try the 
vesafb kernel and see if it produces better text, also xfbdev, and then 
Steven's svga package instead of Xvesa.

The computer is a Gateway with the Windows logo on the cover and Windows 
keys, obviously not designed to be run outside of graphics mode.  It seems 
to do 1024 res at 256 colors.

200MHz, 48MB RAM, 2G hard drive, choice of internal floppy/external CD-ROM 
or vice versa.  A prize if it can be made to display in better resolution 
outside of Windows.  It seems to have come with Win95, judging from the 
CDs and certificates given to us with it, but now runs Win98 (after about 
10 minutes).  No other known hardware problems besides the screen.

Has anyone else run into this model computer or video?

Sindi